Page 56 of The Last Remaining Light

“How comforting,” drawled one of the older scholars.

The merchant snorted before wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “‘Sides, they blunder ‘round causing a panic. Nah, we’d know.” He seemed so certain.

Elowynn stared into the flames as her mind wandered. She remembered the stories and histories from her lessons with Sister Agatha.

Entire villages emptied overnight. Travelers wandering roads with blackened veins beneath their skin and no memory of who or where they were. Households were slaughtered beneath Blackwake skies while the stars vanished overhead, and dawn never came.

The world still feared the Dimming, and it was likely that it always would. People fear what they don't understand. The Dimming was just one of those things that scholars kept trying—and failing—to figure out.

Was it a biological illness? A cosmic corruption? Were the Gods punishing the world?

She thought of Caelyn, then. The heat from the fire no longer reached her, and she shivered.

Null.

Even after everything Sister Agatha taught them, the word still held an influence over the fear inside her. Yet whenever she tried reconciling those terrible legends with the boy she knew—the boy who handcrafted journals by lantern light and remembered tiny, insignificant details about her—the stories no longer aligned. Caelyn was seen as an omen to the world. But he had never scared her the way the Starless did.

A howl split through the darkness, closer this time. Much closer.

Conversations died instantly. Heads turned as travelers exchanged wary glances, each searching the others’ faces for reassurance that the sound had not been as close as they thought.

Even the horses stopped snorting and chewing their feed.

Several of the guards rose with silversteel weapons drawn. The lanterns along the carriages and wagons flickered across the snow, but their reach was short. They couldn't penetrate the darkness past the trees.

Elowynn turned in the direction of the sound, then she noticed slight movement between a copse of the eastern trees. Her pulse was thudding loud in her ears, and she felt out of breath. For one dreadful moment she thought she saw silver-white eyes staring back through the shadows.

Then the shape faded into the shadows.

The guards searched the woods for nearly half a bell before returning with nothing to report. No tracks or sightings.

Nothing.

By the time the camp was settled for sleep, Elowynn—and many others—spent most of the night lying awake, listening to the wolves circle somewhere beyond the ruined walls.

By dawn, fresh snowfall had buried most of the tracks.

What few remained reached the trees and simply… stopped.

The farther north they traveled, the more foreign the landscape seemed.

The forests began to thin into frost-covered plains that seemed to stretch without end beneath gray skies. There were old scars from the Ash Wars that had begun to appear more frequently along the roads. Burned watchtowers and splintered resonance pylons, their crystal shards long since scavenged. There were entire villages abandoned beside collapsed aethercurrent fractures that glowed even beneath the layer of snow.

The wars had touched nearly every corner of Aetheris.

Sometimes they passed other caravans hurrying south before the Frostfall storms sealed the mountain roads. Many carried refugees wrapped in heavy wool, their wagons piled high with everything they had managed to salvage. Scholars traveled among them as well, retreating west from observatories and the smaller settlements scattered across the corrupted eastern territories.

Merchants still traveled the roads in the opposite direction, making their final journeys before winter. They hurried to western towns and abbeys with wagons laden with food, cloth, and winter wares, hoping to trade through the coldest moons before the passes vanished beneath snow.

The farther they traveled, the more the roads seemed to carry people away from the east.

And sometimes, they saw what those people were fleeing.

The Starless were never close enough to threaten the caravan. They appeared only as distant figures wandering in silent groups across ruined hillsides, or lone silhouettes standing motionless beside exposed aethercurrent sites.

The first sighting silenced the entire caravan. Even the most seasoned guards stopped speaking. Only the horses broke the hush, whinnying and stamping nervously as they strained against their reins, desperate to turn back the way they had come.

Elowynn remembered gripping the carriage window hard enough for her fingernails to bite into the wood, leaving shallow crescent marks.