Page 177 of The Last Remaining Light

"No, if they were being controlled, they would try to resist," he repeated.

Caelyn swallowed thickly, his throat working hard as he did. He looked toward the darkness again.

"It feels right to them. This... call. This... feeling. If they feel what I am feeling—” He tapped his own chest for emphasis. “—then it feels comforting to them, so they’re going toward it. Whatever it is.”

Caelyn closed his eyes briefly, because there was one final conclusion he had not spoken aloud. One he desperately wished was not true.

When he opened his eyes again, Elowynn was watching him. Her face already said she’d figured it out.

His brilliant woman.

"What aren't you saying?" she asked gently.

Caelyn stared into the darkness ahead; toward whatever waited at the center of the ancient network buried beneath Aetheris.

Toward whatever had been hidden long before the Great Vigil.

His thoughts shifted to the Starless child in the gallery. The survivors wandering during Blackwake. The old scholar from the shelter who had entered the tunnel without remembering how he had gotten there.

Again and again, they had seen the same pattern.

That scholar hadn't wandered into the depths by accident. He had answered the call... then somehow found his way back to the group before it had fully claimed him.

Caelyn closed his eyes briefly.

“I think they’re going home.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“Knowledge is often described as a light. Few speak of the shadows it reveals.”

— Celestial Archives inscription

The group continued in troubled silence after Caelyn's revelation.

No one dismissed what he had said, but no one seemed eager to discuss it either.

The corridor ahead gradually widened until it no longer resembled a tunnel at all. The walls pulled farther apart, while the ceiling rose beyond the reach of their lanterns. Resonance channels continued running alongside the passage, though these were larger than any they had encountered before. Some disappeared into the walls, and others crossed beneath the floor.

Together they formed a network that seemed less like architecture and more like circulation.

Elowynn studied them and was struck by how closely they resembled diagrams of a biological creature's nervous system.

She really disliked that comparison.

The engineer had stopped trying to map their route several turns ago. Every new chamber contradicted the records he carried, while every discovery rendered the previous one increasingly irrelevant.

It became painfully clear that whatever lay beneath Veylspire had never been intended for ordinary scholars to find.

When the passage bent sharply, the entire group came to an abrupt halt.

A single lantern burned ahead.

For several breaths, nobody moved or said anything. It was the first evidence that they were not alone in these depths.

The light was faint and partially obscured by a collapsed section of stone. Still, there was no mistaking it.

Someone else was here.