Page 142
He looked at Maia one last time, and smiled as the Fracture took him.
Safir’s small cluster of loyalists went with the rest of them. Every one. He stood alone at the plain’s edge and watched the last of his own people taken by the very thing he’d sworn was on their side. Safir crouched, clinging on with everything he could.
It did not touch Caelith at all. Everything on the plain was unravelling, and it was leaving the knot for last.
“Caelith.” Safir’s voice lost its edge entirely. “What did you do?”
Caelith didn’t answer him. Instead he turned to face the tear.
No.
Maia’s understanding arrived all at once, and it was worse than anything the mountain had thrown at her. He had been waiting for the others to go first so that she could see it. So she could see it would be painless, and so that she would understand what he was about to do and why.
And so he could say goodbye.
She crossed the glass plain toward him.
Julen didn’t follow. She heard him settle carefully onto a section of glass that still held. Giving them the only privacy the end of the world allowed.
She reached Caelith and stopped.
The Fracture blazed behind him. The glass veins beneath his skin were brighter than she had ever seen them, the pull of the tear visible in him now, his body already beginning to answer what he had been resisting for centuries.
He looked at her.
And it hit her again. All at once, like the ward breach, like the moment she had woken in white with blood on her hands and known something had changed that could not be unchanged.
He was going with them.
That was what it meant. The others stepping forward one by one, the Fracture drawing them back, the alignment collapsing in their wake. He was not just calling them home. He was going home, too. And home was through the tear, and the tear was closing, and she was standing on the wrong side of it.
“Caelith,” she whispered, tears spilling down her cheeks. “You don’t have to go. He’ll still be here. The Umbralyn - they’ll still rule Eryssan. Safir will still get what he wanted. You are giving him what he wanted!”
“No,” he said. “I gave him what he thinks he wanted.” He looked towards the tear with something that was almost a smile. “Safir thinks he has won something today. Let him believe it. It will not matter, after.”
“After? What does that mean?”
He touched her face deliberately instead of answering, his thumb on her jaw. “Trust me. The way you did on the mountain. The way you did in that chamber below. One more time, and then you will understand everything. I promise you that.”
She wanted to speak. She had a thousand things to say and her mouth would not form a single one of them.
So she stood there, at the edge of the thing she could not stop, and looked at him, and let him see what it was doing to her. She owed him that much honesty. She owed him every part of it.
Behind her, Julen said her name very quietly. She heard it from a long distance away.
Caelith took one step toward her. Just one.
“Maia,” he said softly. His voice held something she recognised from the memory stone, from the tunnels in his past, from centuries of a man learning, too slowly and at too great a cost, what actually mattered. “Will you give me… a little more time? Just you and me.”
She nodded.
He held out his hand and she took it, her body moving before her mind had time to catch up.
The Fracture breathed around them, vast and patient and waiting. And for a little while longer, she let it wait.
52
Beyond the Fracture
