Page 132 of The Reckoning of Starlight

His gaze cut across the fused ring of black glass where the earth simply ended. As if a fist from the sky had punched through the crust and cauterized the wound.

Below the glass lip, the crater walls spiraled inward until darkness swallowed the torchlight. The flame-haired elf had claimed miners sent beyond the lowest levels came back raving. If they came back at all.

Lykor had dismissed it as a tale bred from bad air, collapsing stone, and cowardice. Somewhere beneath the earth, Elashor’s crews had been excavating Hearts of Stars. Lykor intended to take what remained.

The operation scarred the descent in switchbacks, timber walkways slanting between broad landings. Scaffolding and pulley lifts clung to the crater’s throat like rigging on a sinking ship. At every level, tunnels opened into the rock.

Soldiers rotated through the visible landings, their exchanges sloppy enough that a blind colony of vulpintera could’ve flown between them. Whatever discipline Elashor had driven into this place had died with him, and the king hadn’t bothered to replace it.

Their funeral. His advantage.

On the nearest landing, a supply cart lay overturned beside a tunnel entrance, its contents scattered across the boards. Armor scuffed, two elven-blooded soldiers slouched at their post, their weapons propped an arm’s length too far away to reach in a hurry.

The male gestured toward the underground depths with the loose confidence of someone who’d forgotten what a threat looked like. The female shook her head, lips moving around a response that didn’t carry.

Neither of them saw him warp.

Lykor reappeared behind the male, one claw locking around his jaw while the other drove a fistful of shadows through his back. Darkness detonated inside him, erupting from his chest in a ruin of flesh and armor. Lykor hurled the body over the landing’s edge as the female’s mouth opened. His shadows lanced past her teeth and burst through her jaw before the scream could form. She crumpled where she stood, blood and bone pattering across the boards.

Lykor stilled and listened. A lift groaned from somewhere below, and voices ricocheted through the crater, stripped of direction.

He’d marked more soldiers between this landing and the deeper shafts. Anyone left breathing was an alarm waiting to sound. From the rim, the Drowned Spires speared the lake on the horizon. One warning would open a portal, and Galaeryn could be inside the crater before Lykor reached its heart.

No witnesses.

Jassyn had given their forces two days to marshal an assault on the crater. Lykor had lasted an hour before the futility wore his patience down to violence.

Druid formations. Flight routes. Jassyn bent over maps, the crease between his brows promising he’d be there until dawn, refining angles Lykor could bypass with a warp and a fistful of shadows.

A Heart of Stars would free Veyrix. Lykor held to that truth until it covered everything else—the solo journey, the lie he’d given Jassyn about scouting the Aetherveil’s perimeter and checking in with Fenn, whatever waited in Jassyn’s face when he returned.

Before Elashor’s death, the general’s mind had yielded the location in fragments—ridgelines, black glass, a wound cut into the earth. Lykor had opened a portal to the rainforest clearing where Jassyn had taken him to track the human army. He’d flown the rest of the way, hunting the horizon.

Alone, Lykor had only his own survival to calculate. Fewer bodies. No one else he’d have to keep alive.

Another reason waited under the rest, one he kept starved of language. If there were more Hearts below, perhaps one could shatter Galaeryn’s leash on Rimeclaw’s mind or free Blossom again from her chains.

Lykor severed the thought before it rooted. Hope was a dangerous thing to carry into the dark.

He followed the walkways down, the switchbacks tightening as the crater narrowed. Air thickened with excavated earth, stale sweat, and the sour metal of unwashed armor.

Four soldiers from the capital hunched around a makeshift table with stoppered vials of Stardust spread between them.

Lykor didn’t slow. He launched shadows ahead of himself, detonating bodies where they sat. By the time blood struck the planks, he was already gone.

Two landings lower, the scaffolding ended where a tunnel sloped into the crater wall. Stone closed around him as he entered the passage, loose gravel sliding underfoot.

Torches dwindled with the descent as the corridor tapered ahead. Timber braces appeared at wider intervals until only one remained, sagging in its frame, split along the grain.

Beside it, a root had breached the stone, green where the dark should’ve starved it. Its pale tip traced the tunnel floor toward the depths.

Lykor stepped over it without breaking stride.

The stone began to change. Crystal surfaced through the rock in patches, smooth planes repeating with a symmetry no natural fracture could produce.

Lykor stopped and pressed his palm to a facet in the wall. Warmth met him. A low hum traveled through the crystal and settled behind his sternum, answering his pulse with one of its own.

Like Essence, but wrong.