Therion steps forward. Same reaction.
A warning growl rolls through the mountains. The Velmara’s message is clear.
We permit who may pass.
Kael steps forward.
No hesitation. No fear.
His towering frame moves with the unshaken confidence of a man who has never bowed to anything in his life. Dark waves spill over his cerulean eyes, half-masked by the falling snow. He moves like a warrior.
And the Velmara—they do not move.
Kael stops just before them, looking down at them, dominant and unyielding, and they lower their heads.Submitting.
I exhale, something inside me uncoiling, something shattering and reforging itself in the same breath. “I guess it’s you, then.”
Kael lifts his gaze to mine.
“It’s me,” he says simply, but the words mean something more.
It’s always him.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
ELYSSARA
The air is razor-thin here,carrying a sharpness that cuts through breath, through thought. Skaedor’s Crest is less a mountain peak and more a plateau where the world dares to brush against the sky. Bare stone stretches wide and open, cracked and weathered by winds that have never known rest. The silence is profound—not the peaceful kind, but the kind that feels watchful.Expectant.
Above us, the Watcher’s Eye looms—not a sun, not a moon, but a constellation carved into the night like an ancient sentinel. Its stars burn in an unnatural formation, eerie in their precision. They do not flicker. They do not waver. They only watch.
All around me, Aevryn unfurls like a map drawn by unseen hands. Forests coil like dark veins. Rivers glint like slivers of silver. Towns and villages pulse with firelight. From this height, the land looks smaller. Contained.
Until I turn east.
And I see it.
The Shadow Wastes.
The rest of Aevryn is a dance of light and shadow, beauty and ruin. But The Shadow Wastes? They are a wound.
A vast, blackened scar swallowing the land whole. Nothingmoves. Nothing breathes. Even from here, I can tell—it is dead. Decayed. No rivers cut through its scorched earth. No trees break its cracked, barren surface. It is not land.It is absence.
A sickness unfurls in my gut. A slow, crawling nausea. This place should not exist. It is a festering, burdensome wound, and yet—somewhere deep inside me, I know it. Not in memory. Not in understanding. But in my bones.
I feel Kael’s eyes on me—penetrating, watchful, omnipresent, just like the Watcher’s Eye above. He said there is more to this place—his home—but I can’t see how that’s possible.
The wind shifts.
And then, the Stars press closer.
From the eerie silence, a sound begins to rise.
The Watcher’s Eye does not blink. Does not shift.
But it moves.
Not like the Stars, slow and inevitable, bound to the pull of time. This is different. Deliberate. Aware.
