Page 183 of The Last Remaining Light

— Vigil Order report, classified

Nobody moved after Caelyn spoke.

The vibration beneath the floor faded quickly, but the echo of it seemed to remain inside Elowynn’s bones.

She kept her eyes fixed on the darkness beyond the damaged stabilization chamber, and she found herself wishing desperately for a scholar’s mistake. A flawed translation. A misread sigil. Some ordinary explanation that would allow the world to become comprehensible again.

The cracked arrays beneath her feet, Vaelor’s fear, and Caelyn’s pallor all refused to give her that mercy.

Vaelor led them out of the chamber without another word, and Elowynn was struck by how little certainty remained in him.

He studied the walls as they walked, choosing each turn only after examining old markings and broken channels. At one fractured convergence sigil, he hesitated long enough that Korvel finally asked whether the route still even existed. Vaelor had only touched the damaged stone with two fingers, ignoring the question, then turned them down a corridor so narrow that the survivors behind them had to pass through in single file.

The deeper passage seemed to draw all sound out of the air.

Footsteps became muffled against the floor. Lantern chains barely clinked. Even the sound of breathing had diminished in the close dark.

Elowynn stayed beside Caelyn, partly because he still relied on stubbornness more than his healing body, and partly because she couldn't bear the space that opened inside her whenever she stepped too far away from him.

Every so often his gaze drifted ahead with that distant, listening focus she had come to dread, and each time it happened, her grip on his hand tightened. She refused to lose him to something she couldn't even see.

They eventually reached a place where the corridor expanded, and the ceiling lifted into darkness beyond their lights. The transition was so gradual that Elowynn didn't even realize they had entered another chamber until the tunnel failed to close around them again.

The oppressive closeness of the tunnel had given way to a vast, hollow stillness that seemed to hover around them. The channels spread beneath their feet in branching patterns, but the silver glow that had flickered through earlier rooms was absent here, leaving the stone dark and cold.

At first, Elowynn thought the chamber was full of statues.

Several stood near the edge of the lights, motionless beneath the shadow of a broken pillar. Their pale faces caught the glow at odd angles, and their bodies were so still that her mind tried to make them into carved figures before fear could name them otherwise. One wore the remnants of a scholar’s robe. Another had the plain coat of a lower district worker. A third was small enough that Elowynn’s throat constricted before she understood why.

Then one of them blinked.

Alyra's sword whispered free of its sheath, and Lora instinctively slipped in behind her. Beside Vaelor, Korvel went rigid. Somewhere behind them, the engineer choked back what might have become a scream.

Elowynn’s lantern shook in her trembling hand. She adjusted the light, making it brighter, only to find more figures emerging beyond the first few, standing in rows and clusters that disappeared into the dark.

They were Starless.

Not dozens. Not even hundreds.

There were more Starless than Elowynn’s mind could accept at once.

The chamber stretched outward in every direction, and everywhere the light reached, pale faces turned toward them. Some stood alone while others gathered in small groups with the unconscious arrangement of families or friends who had once known how to remain close.

Several sat upon collapsed stone or along the edges of platforms, their clouded eyes fixed forward, their black-veined hands folded in laps or hanging loose at their sides.

None of them rushed at the group or snarled like they had seen in the tower. None of them moved toward the living intruders who had stumbled into their gathering.

That total stillness was worse than any violence she’d seen.

Danger at least made sense.

This did not.

This strange quiet, this waiting, this terrible congregation of people who had once been sons, daughters, scholars, workers, mothers, children, and lovers, felt like standing inside a grief too large for a body to hold.

Caelyn’s hand held tightly to hers.

The movement pulled her attention to him at once. His face had gone gray beneath the soot and exhaustion, and his black eyes were fixed behind the Starless. On the depth of the chamber beyond them.