The Last Star was not a star at all.
For three thousand years, the people of the Veiled Isles had looked up at the sky and seen it there — a single point of light that never moved, never flickered, never dimmed. It had been there when the first ships sailed from the eastern shores, when the great cities were built, when the Sundering split the world and everything changed. Through war and peace, through famine and plenty, the Last Star had remained constant, a beacon in the darkness that had guided generations of travelers home.
And now Kaelen knew the truth. The Last Star was not a star. It was a wound.
He stood at the highest point of the Obsidian Tower, the ancient structure that had served as the seat of magical knowledge since before the Sundering. Below him, the city of Threshold sprawled across the cliff edges and the bridges that connected them, its thousands of lights glowing against the eternal night. But Kaelen was not looking at the city. He was looking up, at the point of light that hung in the sky like a splinter of frozen fire.
The Elder’s words from three days ago still echoed in his mind. The Sundering was not natural. The Council had caused it. The wound in reality was still there, and something was trying to get through. Kaelen had spent every hour since then in the archives of the Tower, reading texts that had not been touched in centuries, searching for any mention of what the wound really was and what it meant.
And he had found something. A fragment of an old text, damaged and incomplete, that spoke of the Last Star in terms that made his blood run cold. It was not a star, the text said. It was a door. A door that had been built to keep something out, and after the Sundering, had been left unguarded.
The door was opening.
Kaelen turned from the window and began to pace. The chamber he was in was lined with shelves that held the most dangerous magical artifacts in the world — weapons and tools and instruments of power that had been collected over millennia. He had access to all of them, as Chief Archivist of the Tower, but he had never used any of them. He was not a warrior. He was a scholar, a keeper of knowledge, someone who preferred to read about battles rather than fight in them.
But the knowledge he now carried was more dangerous than any weapon in this room. He knew what the Council had done. He knew what they had hidden. And he knew that the barriers that had protected the world for three centuries were finally failing.
The question was what to do about it.
He could go to the Council. Share what he had learned, demand that they take action. But he knew how that would end. The Council had kept this secret for three hundred years. They were not going to suddenly decide to reveal it now, not when doing so would destroy everything they had built. They would silence him, as they had silenced anyone who had ever gotten too close to the truth. Kaelen was good at his job, but even the Shadow’s Edge could be retired permanently if he became a liability.
He could go to the people. Publish what he knew, let the truth spread. But that would cause panic, chaos, a breakdown of the social order that had held the world together since the Sundering. And it would not stop the door from opening. The people needed to be prepared, not panicked, and there was no way to prepare them without causing the very fear he was trying to avoid.
Or he could act alone. Find the source of the problem and deal with it himself, without involving anyone else. The Council had created this mess, and the Council had the resources to fix it, but they would never admit that. So someone else would have to step in. Someone who knew the truth and could not be silenced by the usual methods.
Someone like Kaelen.
He stopped pacing and looked up at the Last Star again. It seemed brighter than it had been a week ago. Or perhaps it was his imagination, his fear making him see things that were not there. But he did not think so. The text he had found had been very specific. The door was opening, slowly but surely, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it.
Except, perhaps, there was.
The text had mentioned a key. A way to seal the door permanently, to heal the wound and restore the barriers that had protected the world for so long. But the text had been incomplete, damaged in the same catastrophe that had split the world into three. The key had been lost, or hidden, or destroyed. And no one had ever gone looking for it, because no one else had known it existed.
Until now.
Kaelen moved to his desk and began to sort through the papers he had been collecting for the past three days. Maps and manuscripts, fragments and references, clues that he had gathered from the deepest archives of the Tower. He was looking for a specific location — the place where the key had been kept before the Sundering, the place where someone might have hidden it to prevent it from being used.
It took him three more hours of searching. But when he finally found it, the answer was so obvious that he almost laughed. The key was in the City of Echoes, the ancient capital that had been destroyed during the Sundering and now lay in ruins at the center of the Severed Lands. It had been there all along, waiting to be found.
Kaelen gathered his things and prepared to leave. He would need supplies, weapons, perhaps some form of protection against the dangers of the Severed Lands. He would need to inform someone of his plans, in case he did not return. And he would need to do it all without attracting the attention of the Council, who would almost certainly try to stop him if they knew what he was planning.
The Last Star shone above him as he left the Tower, bright and cold and patient. Somewhere on the other side of that door, something was waiting. And Kaelen was going to find the key that would send it back to wherever it came from.
Whether the Council liked it or not.