Page 66 of The Last Remaining Light

I miss you too, by the way. More than I know how to write properly.

She pressed her fingers lightly against the page before finally folding it closed with careful precision. She would be devastated if she tore it.

Just under three moons.

That was how long correspondence took between Veylspire and Lumenshire once one accounted for waiting couriers, weather delays, and mountain crossings. One moon south. One moon north. Another half spent waiting for routes to reopen or caravans to gather after the letter was written.

The distance between them felt endless some suns, and yet his words remained the closest thing she had to home.

Outside one of the common room windows, observatory bells tolled through the city announcing the tenth bell of dawn. Elowynn reached for the gauzy curtain and pulled it aside, peering out at the terraces below.

Veylspire shimmered beneath the morning summer light, and she watched as scholars already walked in purposeful strides along the crystalline bridges and toward their morning duties. Her eyes lifted to the mountainside and flitted across its expanse. Her ears twitched as she tuned in to the soft humming coming from the great resonance towers.

It truly was immense and beautiful.

Elowynn had been in the city for just over half a turning now, and she still felt as though she stood just outside it all.

Her studies had never been the problem. Theories regarding the aethercurrents came easily to her, as did resonance mathematics and celestial observation. Most lectures left her with more questions than confusion, and several others had already begun seeking her opinion on specialized research.

No, scholarship was not where her troubles lay.

People were.

Stars take her. There were simply too many of them.

The people of the city were constant gears in a mechanism. Conversations unfolded like political duels disguised beneath pleasantries while observatory alliances constantly changed direction beneath layers of polite smiles and carefully practiced words. Half the scholars within the Spire seemed obsessed with influence, the other half with proving themselves intellectually superior to everyone around them.

Elowynn often found herself retreating into the library or the darkest corners of the archives simply to breathe.

Which, unfortunately, only made people more interested in her.

“Hello! Elowynn?”

Elowynn startled before releasing the curtain and glanced away from the window. She blinked up from the harmonic resonance texts scattered across the table, finally focusing on her friend.

“Lost again in those books,” Lorna chirped in her lyrical voice.

“I have determined that you have this uncanny ability to appear out of nowhere,” Elowynn observed, ignoring the jab at her reading habits.

“It keeps life interesting,” Lora said with a grin.

She was dressed in a lightweight robe that draped over her petite frame like molten silver, and her dark curls were piled atop her head in her signature messy updo. Lora balanced three scrolls, two journals, and an entire bowl of fruit covered in an unnecessary amount of sugar in her arms. Making her way around to the other side of the lounge across from Elowynn, she dropped dramatically onto it, her bun bobbing comically with the movement.

Unlike Elowynn, Lora thrived within Veylspire’s chaos. She navigated the city with effortless confidence, managing friendships across both the Auric Conclave and the Ascendant Collegium despite making a sport of provoking the ire of both factions equally.

Elowynn envied her confidence, mostly because she still struggled to feel as though she belonged within the Spire.

“I still can’t believe you missed the symposium on the eastern terraces last sun,” Lora said through a mouthful of fruit.

“I was occupied,” Elowynn muttered, reaching for one of the star charts she’d been studying.

“Nooo...” Lora drawled, wiping her fingers on her robe. “You were avoiding people,” she corrected.

Elowynn pulled her gaze up to lock onto her friend’s face a moment. “That as well.”

Lora pointed accusingly toward the papers scattered across the table. “You cannot continue hiding inside resonance theory forever! You need to get out! See the city from outside the towers of the Spire! You need to live, woman!”

Elowynn glanced toward the mess of research spread before her. Dense notations covered nearly every bit of parchment: harmonic convergence calculations, instability mapping, fractured current patterns, old Vigil-era resonance records copied from archive texts.