Page 35 of The Last Remaining Light

The Starless.

Caelyn would learn the term for these people later, but he remembered understanding what he saw. There was something vastly wrong about them compared to the way humans normally walked. Their movements were disjointed, and they jerked beneath twisted limbs while blackened veins pulsed grotesquely beneath gray skin stretched too tightly across their bones. One lifted its head slowly toward the cliffs above.

Its eyes glowed a milky white in the darkness.

His mother grabbed him hard, her fingers crushing his hand.

“Run,” she whispered.

The terror in her voice finally broke him free from his shock.

Somewhere behind them came a low wail—not human wailing, but something warped and terrible. Mournful. It was a sound that still clawed its way into his nightmares.

He remembered his mother kept stumbling and the coughs she tried to hide when she ran too hard. The way her hands trembled while gripping his own. He remembered seeing the dark veins begin to spread beneath the skin along her throat.

By the time they reached the lower ravine, she could barely stay upright.

Then something hit him from behind.

Pain exploded through the back of his skull hard enough to throw him sideways against the rocks. The world blurred.

Caelyn remembered blood filling his mouth and rainwater pooling beneath his cheek. He spit out the blood, a loose tooth coming out with it. Somewhere nearby, his mother screamed his name.

Then came the whispers.

At first, he thought someone stood nearby speaking too softly for him to understand. Hundreds of voices overlapping with one another beneath the storm. But the sound grew louder. Closer. He tried plugging his ears but realized… the words were not coming from nearby.

The words came from inside him.

That cold feeling flooded through his body so completely he could no longer feel his hands, and he began to shake terribly.

The black crystal spreading through the ravine had begun glowing beneath the rain, sickly purple and smoky resonance leaking slowly through its fractured surface. Caelyn remembered trying to crawl backward away from it only for his hand to slip directly into the corruption.

The pain was indescribable.

It was worse than anything he’d ever experienced. It felt as though the world itself had pushed inside his body only to try to rip its way back out through his organs and flesh.

The whispers rose into ear-piercing shrieks. The currents beneath the earth, howling around him harsh enough to shake the stones beneath his body while black resonance crawled slowly across his skin.

And then—

Silence.

Perfect silence.

Everything vanished all at once.

The whispers.

The pain.

Even the sound of the resonance.

The world went completely still around him.

Caelyn remembered sobbing through gasping breaths as the corruption touching his skin cracked without warning down the center. Silver light burst outward beneath the earth in blinding fractures while every Starless in the valley below stopped moving simultaneously.

They all turned toward him together, watching as though they sensed something.