Page 184 of The Last Remaining Light

He looked as though he’d feared this.

The pull that had haunted him since they entered the bowels of the city had led them here. Whatever he felt now seemed to move through him with such force that Elowynn feared he might step forward without meaning to.

“Caelyn,” she whispered, the name little more than a breath between them.

He didn't answer with his voice, though his fingers closed more firmly around hers as if he had heard her from very far away. The black veins beneath his skin darkened, then faded beneath the pressure of her touch.

Every Starless in the chamber turned its gaze toward him.

Thousands of clouded eyes found Caelyn at once, neither with hunger nor hatred, but with an attention that felt almost expectant.

Elowynn heard Lora inhale sharply behind her, and Alyra’s blade lifted another fraction. Vaelor, for all his secrets and all his hard-earned restraint, looked as though he had just watched a theory become flesh. Elowynn was rooted too far in terror to voice any question.

Caelyn swallowed, and when he spoke, his voice was rough.

“They’ve been waiting.”

The words settled like a suffocating blanket over the group.

Vaelor looked toward him. “For what?”

Caelyn’s gaze remained fixed somewhere beyond the gathered Starless, where the chamber descended into a black void surrounding a structure. Elowynn could barely make out whatever it was he was looking at. She noticed his breathing had become shallow, though whether from pain, fear, or the force of whatever tugged at him, she couldn't tell.

When he finally answered, the words sounded as though they had been dragged out of him.

“They're waiting for whatever is sleeping down there to wake up.”

No one had a response for that.

A pulse of silver light glinted somewhere in the distance.

It came from far beyond the reach of their lanterns, low and brief, illuminating the outline of an immense structure half-buried in the deepest part of the chamber.

Elowynn saw only fragments before darkness reclaimed it: curved stone, broken pylons, channels converging inward like rivers feeding a black sea.

The light lasted no more than a single heartbeat, but every Starless turned toward it at the same time, facing the distant glow.

And then, slowly, one by one, they began to kneel.

Chapter Forty-Two

“There are moments when love is not a feeling. It is a decision.”

— Notes recovered from a burned journal

The chamber seemed suspended outside of time.

Thousands of pale figures remained facing the distant structure hidden within the darkness, their heads bowed and their bodies perfectly still. The unsettling silence pressed against Elowynn's ears until she became painfully aware of every breath she took and every beat of her heart.

Somewhere beyond the sea of kneeling Starless, another pulse of silver light glimmered temporarily before it died out.

Caelyn had gone rigid beside her.

His hand remained wrapped around hers, but she could feel the tension running through him. The black veins along his throat stood out starkly against gray skin. His attention remained fixed on the darkness below. He looked less like a man standing beside her and more like someone eavesdropping on a distant voice that only he could hear.

The sight forced her to confront something she had spent turnings trying to avoid. She finally understood why others looked at him the way they did.

The Starless reacted to him. The thing beneath the world reacted to him. Whatever connection existed between Nulls and the ancient darkness was no longer something scholars debated in archives.