Page 135 of The Reckoning of Starlight

The floor shuddered. Somewhere beyond the mine, earth ground against earth, the movement deep enough to climb his legs.

The passage emptied into a chamber. Crystalline ribs curved overhead, vanishing into darkness. Along the far wall, the weight of the earth had split the structure open, stones spilling through the jagged wound.

Five humans hauled rubble from the breach, stacking it in piles. Beyond them, half-hidden behind a ridge of broken stone, an armored figure sat slumped against the crystal.

The miners stooped and lifted in perfect unison. One dragged a leg bent sideways below the knee. Another’s hands had worn open, tendons shifting with every grip.

None of them slowed.

At first, Lykor took them for another crew.

Then one turned.

Her eyes passed through him, fixed and glassy. Her head kept rotating past the point where her neck should’ve broken. A heartbeat later, her torso snapped around to follow, joints cracking into alignment, and she bent for another stone.

Lykor’s shadows cinched around his fists, ready to strike.

Aesar appeared beside the nearest human. “She’s not breathing.”

Her chest remained still while her arms lifted another slab, her feet crossing the ground without faltering. Whatever kept these bodies upright, Lykor couldn’t trace it, the Essence in the walls too dense to isolate a single source.

Aesar drifted to the elf slumped at the chamber’s edge, one arm fused into the crystal behind him. The soldier’s armor hung loose on a frame thinned past starvation, breath scraping out of him. Alive. Barely.

He clutched a Starshard in his fist. From it, crystal had climbed over his wrist and spread into the wall, sealing both flesh and gem into a single glinting mass.

His eyes stared at nothing, pupils blown wide, his lips moving around words too faint to hear.

Light pulsed through the Starshard. Across the chamber, the corpses jerked in response. Five bodies continued to haul rubble into piles, each movement keeping time with the elf’s whisper.

A chill settled under Lykor’s ribs, deeper than Rimeclaw’s frost.

The miners above had already been dead.

He’d walked past them without a second glance while they chipped at stone, flinched from empty air, and whispered to no one.

Neither he nor Aesar spoke as the corpses kept working and the crystal hummed around them.

“There’s nothing we can do for him,” Aesar said at last when the wall claimed another sliver of skin.

“Wasn’t planning on it.” Lykor left the elf to the crystal and the dead behind.

The corridor divided into passages no miner could’ve carved. Some opened to what might’ve once been living quarters—low platforms recessed into the walls, waist-high ledges projecting from the crystal, shallow impressions where objects had rested and been removed. Roots needled through fractures in the floor, alive where stone and silence should’ve starved them.

Aesar paused at every threshold until Lykor’s stare pulled him onward. By the next turn, he’d stopped looking into the side chambers, his focus ahead.

“Essence is converging toward a single source,” he murmured, studying the pulsing illumination. “Whatever lies at the heart of this place, we’re walking toward it.”

“Glad a century sharing a skull hasn’t dulled your powers of observation,” Lykor muttered.

“Still waiting for evidence you possess any.”

The corridor funneled inward, its walls drawing close as the ceiling lowered. The light under Lykor’s feet narrowed with it, a thin band cutting through the crystal.

A root brushed his neck. He struck it aside without looking at the growth piercing the ceiling.

The passage released him into a chamber vast enough to swallow every space behind them. Its ceiling climbed toward an apex lost in shadow. At the center, a dais throbbed with power, slow rings of Essence spreading through the crystal like shockwaves across still water.

A figure hovered above it, wrought from turquoise light, its edges breaking like flame. It faced a raised pedestal with one arm extended, Essence gathering around its fingers.