Page 167 of The Last Remaining Light

— Fragment from an unpublished Collegium lecture

For a long while after leaving the great chamber, no one spoke.

Elowynn could understand why. Every answer they uncovered seemed to expose something larger beneath it.

The corridors beyond the chamber no longer resembled Veylspire in any meaningful way. The elegant stonework of the city above had fully disappeared, replaced by darker blocks fitted together with disturbing precision.

There were no flourishes of Astrari craftsmanship meant to inspire awe in visiting scholars or remind citizens of the city’s brilliance. Everything down here felt engineered toward a specific function. The walls had been built to endure, the passages had been built to guide movement, and the resonance channels running alongside the floor had been carved with a level of care that suggested function was far more important than beauty.

Elowynn couldn’t stop herself from studying every surface they passed. Questions crowded her thoughts faster than she could organize them, and every new symbol seemed to connect to something she had once encountered in an archive and then dismissed as incomplete.

Stabilization marks appeared where she had expected decorative borders to be. The routing channels faded into walls at angles no modern engineer would choose without some specific reason. The farther down they traveled, the more she accepted how much of her education had consisted of only fragments.

She found herself wondering whether those missing pieces had been lost through time or removed by design.

That possibility made her angry.

Knowledge was lost all the time. Fires happened, wars raged, entire libraries drowned beneath floods. Still, what surrounded them felt dissimilar. The structures beneath Veylspire didn't resemble ruins uncovered by mere accident, nor did they feel like abandoned corridors overlooked by simple neglect.

They felt deliberately buried. As though generation after generation had been permitted to see only enough of the truth to maintain the city above while remaining ignorant of the foundation beneath it.

Ahead of her, Caelyn moved through the tunnel lost in thought. Elowynn noticed him touching the walls before she understood why the motion worried her.

At first, it seemed casual, a wounded man steadying himself as the passage sloped downward beneath his feet. Then she saw that his fingers were not grasping for balance. They traced the old stone with the same distant attention he had worn in the shelter when he spoke of the pull beneath the city.

He was listening again. Or… feeling the call again.

Caelyn’s hand dropped from the wall as she walked closer to him. The quickness of the movement told her he'd hoped no one had noticed.

“Does it feel stronger?” she asked.

He looked ahead rather than at her. “Just different.”

Elowynn waited patiently, not pushing him to speak.

He let out a slow breath, and she saw the effort it took for him to speak instead of burying the truth beneath another claim of being fine.

“It’s weaker in places and more prominent in others. The pull isn’t coming from everywhere. It… follows lines.”

“Like currents?” she asked.

His gaze flickered toward her. The fear and uncertainty in his eyes quieted every other thought in her head.

“Maybe,” he said.

Elowynn looked around them more closely. Her focus moved toward the dark channel carved beside the floor, then toward the markings disappearing into the walls. The connection formed with such sudden clarity that she nearly stopped walking.

Aethercurrents carried resonance through the world. Cities had been built atop stable lines. Observatories had studied and regulated them for centuries, but if these structures were older than the observatories, and if they were arranged around lines Caelyn could feel…

Then perhaps these structures had been built to intentionally sit above them.

Before she could follow that train of thought, the tunnel widened again, and the group emerged into another chamber. This one was much smaller than the last.

Rows of stone tables filled this room, their surfaces coated in thick, gray dust that softened the edges of abandoned instruments. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, while cabinets and storage alcoves occupied every available space between them. Several stools remained tucked beneath worktables, though others had fallen and stayed where they lay. A lantern sat on one table near an open ledger, empty of light but positioned so naturally that Elowynn found herself glancing toward the far doorway, half expecting someone to return and scold them for intruding.

Nothing about the room suggested ordinary abandonment.

It suggested interruption.