Chapter Sixteen
Beware the walls that promise peace
The safest cages never creak
Night and day bleed into one another. Impossible to know when one ends and the other begins. The sun stands sentry over Caeloria—on permanent watch. Unblinking. Unforgiving. Unrelenting.
Kael has stopped measuring time. He measures heat instead. In breaths. In blisters. In the way Elyssara’s head drops lower and lower without her noticing.
They’re both moving slower.
Kael feels it in his muscles before he registers it with his eyes—the slight drag in his gait, the hesitation before each step, the way his breath saws shallow and sharp through flared nostrils.
Even shadow offers no mercy here. The sun presses down regardless, flattening the world into heat and glare and mirage.
His own thoughts have begun to slip. Not panic—never panic—but something quieter and more dangerous. The blurring of edges. The loss of sequence. He can no longer remember how long it has been since they last stopped, only that stopping feels like surrender. And surrender feels like dying.
Elyssara sways.
Not enough to fall. Just enough that Kael’s hand shoots out instinctively to catch her waist, fingers biting into sun-warmed leather and skin. She doesn’t protest. That, more than anything, sets his teeth on edge.
She should protest. She should swat him away and insist that she’s fine.
Her lips are cracked. Salt has dried white at her temples, at the hollow of her throat.
The heat has demanded a cost—her leathers, her armor, now draped across her forearm.
But the sun’s too oppressive to expose her skin—she’s draped her cloak across her shoulders in protection instead.
The desert takes without ceremony. It does not care who you are.
“Do you know where we are yet?” Elyssara rasps, the words scratching from her throat.
Kael lifts his gaze to the unending horizon. To the blur of sand and glare and dunes spiraling in every direction.
“No,” he says. “We’re only fucked if we’re going west.” His words sound lazy and slurred, as if he’s too deep in his cups.
Elyssara doesn’t even speak, simply quirks a brow in question as if to say, “What’s west?”
“The Throat,” he answers. “The narrow strait between Nymeris and Caeloria. Full of pirates intercepting shipments.”
Elyssara grunts her acknowledgement, not wasting energy on something as trivial as words.
So Kael lets down the walls blocking the tether.
North, we hit Kethra. South, Solmere. East, Azhareth. He sends the words to Elyssara through the tether.
She looses a sharp breath of relief. Or maybe it’s hope because he let her in.
My love. Her words slide down the tether in a breathy pant, and Kael can feel the ache there. The grief. The absence.
But the Decay is opportunistic, lashing its tongue across the boundaries of Kael’s mind and coiling down the Starbound tether, as if it feeds off Elyssara’s Light. And for a heartbeat, Kael isn’t sure it knows the difference between her Light and prey.
Elyssara feels it, too—he can see it in the way she stills. Sensing, curious, disquieted. Unsettled by the gnawing, empty, sinister darkness that drenches everything it touches in eternal absence.
So Kael raises his walls and cuts off the serpent’s head, containing it within the fortress of his mind.
Elyssara doesn’t release the breath she’s holding.
“I’m sorry, El—”
But she cuts him off.
“It’s not that. Kael, your eyes… they’re black.”
Fuck.
“It… it seems to happen when I let go. Of control, I mean. It strikes,” he admits, and he fucking hates the burden he’s placing on her.
Elyssara’s eyes are narrowed in concern.
No—more than that. Despair. But Kael watches the way she pulls herself from drowning.
Because Elyssara won’t let him descend into his own pity, nor her own.
She never does. Her mouth lifts up at the sides.
“You’ll die from dehydration before the madness takes you if you don’t find us some fucking water. ”
Fuck, she’s beautiful when she smiles.
“I thought you said we couldn’t joke about it, El,” he counters, his lip cracking in a fractured split with the smirk he returns.
“No, I said you couldn’t joke about it. But me?
What good is a secret if I can’t wield it?
” Her eyes brighten—the first time her energy has sparked since their arrival.
“I’m the only one who knows the King of Zerynthia is going mad—perhaps I’ll use it to my advantage and make a play for your throne. ”
Despite the rasping dryness in his throat, Kael laughs. Unbridled and free. He laughs, and he swears the Stars hear him—because the sun moves fractionally to the west. Not setting. But shifting.
Geography snaps into place in Kael’s mind, suddenly oriented by an almost imperceptible shift of the sun.
Elyssara clocks the movement.
“This way,” Kael directs, urging himself away from the dying sun to the east. To Azhareth.
But Elyssara hesitates, not moving in the direction, eyes darting around in confusion. Not faltering, but responding.
“I can feel something,” Elyssara murmurs. “I can feel… searching. But… not my own.”
Kael pauses for a heartbeat, and that’s when it clicks.
“The Astral Compass,” he announces. “Your satchel.”
Elyssara’s eyes blow wide, and she scrambles through her mother’s worn leather satchel, until she plucks out the Compass she found at Skaedor’s Crest. Pulled there by the Stars themselves.
The dial wavers, wobbles, swings from side to side like it’s searching for something nearby.
Elyssara moves, trying to orient herself with the Compass.
Kael notices the moment it decides. It’s subtle, but unmistakable. It settles, only a slight tremor in the dial now, reading a language written beneath the sand. A language older than maps. Older than kings.
Elyssara veers. Not dramatically—just enough that the Compass comes to a complete stop.
She slows, changing rhythm—testing, listening. Elyssara looks to Kael with a flicker of something dangerously close to relief. He forces it away. Hope is a luxury here.
But the Compass flares to life again, spinning in frantic circles as if it’s communicating something.
Elyssara looks up at Kael, confused and irritated.
But realization dawns. “It’s beneath us. We’re standing atop whatever it wants us to find.”
A small breath escapes Elyssara.
“What do you want more than anything, El?” Kael asks, knowing it’s the only thing the Compass will find.
Realization hits her too.
“Water,” she breathes.
Kael nods, stomping once at the sand.
Twice.
Then he drops his weight back and stamps—hard. The sound is dull, swallowed by the earth, but Kael feels the vibration travel up through his legs, through his veins, into his bones.
Elyssara’s knees buckle under her own weight—weak from excessive, inescapable heat.
The sand burns through Kael’s pants as he drops to one knee, pressing his palm to the ground where his boot struck. The heat is still there—but beneath it, faint and unmistakable, is cool.
Water.
Not a spring. Not a blessing. A vein. Buried deep, stubborn, alive despite everything above it trying to kill it.
Kael turns his head and looks at Elyssara with certainty.
He exhales a laugh that scrapes his throat raw. “Water,” he murmurs, his chest loosening in relief.
He moves quickly then—urgency snapping him fully back into himself. He slides an arm around Elyssara, easing her to the ground in the narrow shadow he creates with his body. Her eyes flutter, unfocused, but she breathes easier almost immediately, like her body knows before her mind does.
Kael digs.
Not with elegance. Not with patience. He tears at the sand with bare hands, skin blistering, nails splitting, until damp darkens the earth. Until water finally wells up—slow, precious, real.
Kael cups the water and presses it to Elyssara’s lips. “Drink,” he orders softly. “Easy. I’ve got you.”
She does. Trusting him without question—like she always has, like he’s terrified she always will.
And for the first time since Caeloria opened its jaws around them, Kael allows himself to believe they might live long enough to reach its heart.
The sun does not set. Not fully. It stays vigilant and watchful. It endures.
The Stars may not have dealt death to Kael and Elyssara today, but that doesn’t mean they’ll offer respite. Certainly not the reprieve of nightfall.
And they have not yet reached the outskirts of Azhareth. Death may not be done with them yet.
The land begins to change. The endless sand mixes with packed earth and shattered stone, and Kael knows they’re getting close. The heat doesn’t lessen—it sharpens, pressing down like a warning. Even Elyssara lifts her head, slowing her pace as if she senses a threat.
The canteen of water they filled from the Matuli Desert’s vein runs dry once more.
Elyssara’s breathing is once again labored, and Kael stumbles as he surges up a dune, and that’s when they see it:
The walls rise from the desert like a scar.
Pale stone, sun-bleached and immense, etched with sigils meant to be seen from miles away. No banners. No gates thrown wide. Just height. Just mass.
A city that does not invite. It endures.
Kael studies the walls the way he studies battlefields. Not for beauty. For weakness. But fury takes root instead.
Queen Maireth has fooled her people—she speaks of safety, protection, provision.
But this is not safety. It is confinement disguised as care.
An illusion carefully maintained, where fear is nurtured just enough to make obedience feel like reason.
Where comfort is rationed and freedom reframed as danger.
Kings and queens have always known that fear is easier to govern than trust. That people will trade autonomy for reassurance if you convince them the world beyond the walls is worse.
And once they do, they will defend the cage themselves.
Give them something to fear, and they’ll build their own cages for you.
Elyssara straightens beside him. Still pale. Still burning. But upright. Watching.
“The walls…” she murmurs. “They’re a prison.”
Kael grunts in disgust. “But most of them will tell you it’s freedom. Maireth is nothing if not convincing.”
His gut roils at the thought. The gross over-extension of power. The tyranny dressed up as service.
“They just accept this?” Elyssara scoffs in disbelief. “Why?”
The question hangs in the air between them. Why?
“Because people with voices gain more from staying silent than speaking up here,” he murmurs, and the Decay rears its head, waking at the promise of violence.
The veins in his corded forearms flare black, serpents crawling up his arms like predators on the hunt.
His gaze lifts to the city again—the outskirts, the city proper hidden behind stone. The walls rise high enough to challenge the sky.
But Kael has never believed stone can keep out destiny.
“We need to change that,” Elyssara growls through gritted teeth, jaw set with defiance.
“We need to break into the fucking city,” Kael says, and for the first time since the Decay fell in Kryntar, he feels like himself.
“But first, I need to see someone.”