Chapter 35
LYKOR
Lykor crouched at the rim of the Falling Star Crater.
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.
His mind reached sideways for Aesar before he could stop it, the question already formed. WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THIS?
Silence answered.
Lykor’s jaw locked. He pulled his hand away and kept moving.
Alone.
Aesar should’ve had three theories by now, mumbling about resonance patterns and whatever academic drivel Kyansari’s archives had fed him a century ago. Lykor refused to reach for the memories Aesar had left behind.
Not when every path through them ended at Kal.
Metal struck crystal somewhere ahead, each blow ringing through the tunnel. The passage curved, and Lykor followed the sound to its source.
Humans.
They worked along one wall, hacking rock from an exposed span of crystal. Their arms rose and fell in broken rhythm. Mechanical. Hollow-eyed.
One flinched at empty air, his head snapping toward a vacant corridor. Another mouthed silent words to herself, already half-gone.
They’d been down here too long.
A miner pried a Starshard from a seam in the rock and carried it to the elven overseer, who settled it into a straw-lined crate on a cart.
Lykor wouldn’t mistake those forced to swing the pick for a threat while another held the leash.
At least a score of crystals already gleamed under his hands, destined for Galaeryn’s arsenal.
Not anymore.
Essence throbbed through the walls in waves dense enough to smother any Lykor would summon. He warped behind the overseer, sealed one palm over his mouth, and wrenched him into a side tunnel without the humans looking up.
The elf struck the far wall with a muffled grunt. Lykor punched shadows through his ribs, flesh and splintered bone spraying the stone red.
Lykor returned to the cart, opened a portal into a hidden cavern he’d found in the Aetherveil, and shoved it across the threshold.
One miner’s pick faltered. Her gaze flicked toward the side corridor, then dropped back to the rock.
Beyond the mining station, the passage opened into something no mortal hand had cut.
The ceiling rose beyond the reach of torchlight.
Rough-hewn stone gave way to crystalline panels fitted so precisely their seams vanished.
Narrow recesses lined the walls at measured intervals, each the length of his forearm.
Empty.
Lykor slowed. Chisel gouges and pry marks broke the flawless crystal around each opening. Bent brackets remained within, their fittings wrenched loose. Whatever had rested there had been torn out.
A curse pressed against his teeth. If those recesses had held Hearts of Stars, Galaeryn’s crews had already stripped them clean.
The Starshards he’d claimed would do nothing to free a dragon.
But the corridor still stretched on. And Lykor hadn’t come this far to leave with scraps.
A cool current slid through the passage, carrying none of the mine’s dust, damp earth, or mineral tang. Metallic sharpness prickled over his fangs, like the warning charge before lightning broke.
The vibration traveling through the crystal sped up, as if the resonance adjusted to his presence.
Then the floor responded.
Illumination erupted under his feet and raced ahead. The hum sharpened, its pitch climbing until it locked into a single note.
Lykor stopped. The light stopped with him, darkness waiting a pace beyond his boots.
He stepped back. The glow retreated with him, reopening the way behind. When he advanced, it tore farther down the corridor.
His talons bit into his palms. Every instinct that had kept him alive for a century ordered him back. Whatever wanted him closer was something to flee.
Lykor stepped forward.
His breath locked when a voice slipped into his mind. Barely a whisper, less than a thought.
He knew it as surely as his own pulse.
“This place knows what we are.”