Page 99 of The Last Remaining Light

He would go toward her.

Chapter Twenty-One

“The most dangerous men are rarely the loudest ones. The dangerous men are the ones who carry violence like a hidden weapon.”

— Restricted Vigil assessment, author unknown

Frostfall, 755 A.V.

Caelyn stood beside the caravan at the edge of the northern ridge road as dawn spilled silver light across the mountain peaks.

For several long moments, he could only stare.

His jaw had apparently forgotten how to close.

The city was enormous, and he felt overwhelmed by merely looking at it.

Tower after tower rose directly from the mountains, linked by suspended bridges glowing with the pale light of astrylite. Crystalline observatories pierced the clouds overhead, while below, endless terraces spiraled down the cliffs into the shimmering resonance haze. Every level teemed with life despite the early bell.

And then there were the telescopes.

Elowynn had spoken of them in her letters, but to see them in person?

They were beautiful. Impossibly so.

Somewhere within that vast city, beyond its towers and bridges and observatories, was Elowynn.

He was so close to her, yet he had never felt farther away.

How, in the name of the Dimming, was he supposed to find one woman in a city this immense?

“Well,” muttered one of the caravan guards beside him. “You look disappointed.”

Caelyn blinked his attention over to the guard. “What?”

The older man snorted. “Usually people cry or vomit the first time they see Veylspire. You just look like you want to kill somebody.”

Oh, if he only knew.

The last two spans of travel north had left Caelyn in increasingly foul moods. The caravan itself had not been particularly difficult; Agatha’s arrangements ensured he traveled without much attention among the merchants transporting resonance equipment toward the observatory districts.

But the roads had grown darker the further north they traveled.

More than once the caravan had altered its route to avoid ancient Starfall Ruins rising from the wilderness. Caelyn had expected crumbling stone and little else. Instead, he glimpsed stone-impossible structures half-swallowed by forests and mountainsides. Black crystalline growths climbed fractured walls and astrylite veins pulsed from beneath the exposed stone where sections had been sheared away from time and weather. One ruin seemed to descend farther into the earth than it rose above it, disappearing into a chasm that none of the caravan guards would look at directly.

They all gave it a wide berth, refusing to linger near those places. The merchants spoke of them in lowered voices and hurried the wagons onward whenever one appeared along the alternate routes. The two scholars had been whispering about them, though, and Caelyn eavesdropped.

“...people go missing in them while others who get too near hear strange whispers. I heard half a turning ago about a survey team from Silvermere that went into the ruins east of them. They returned to their camp a few suns later. But they swore they’d only been gone for a few bells. They had no recollection of time or nothing!”

“My uncle passed near one and said he heard those whispers, but he couldn’t describe them. Also said his compass got all wonky and wouldn’t work right and his horses were agitated.”

As Caelyn heard that last part, the horses let out loud whinnies and stomped at the ground.

That was when they had spotted Starless watching from tree lines near abandoned villages.

The first sighting made everyone nervous and anxious; the second sighting made everyone scared.

And three nights earlier, just beyond a mountain pass, the Starless attacked.