THE LAST STARKEEPER

Chapter 3: The Tower

His tower smelled of ink and brass and the particular cold of stone that never fully warmed. Nyra sat in the only chair that wasn't covered in star charts while Kael made something hot in a pot over a fire, and she looked around at the walls covered in his observations and felt something she had not expected to feel this far below the sky.

Recognition.

Every chart on his walls, every calculation scratched in his careful hand, every mapped position and predicted arc — they were all familiar. Not because he had copied them from somewhere. Because he had derived them himself, from observation, from patience, from the particular kind of love that asks nothing back from its object.

He had mapped her people. Not knowing what they were. Just — looking up, and seeing them, and recording what he saw with a fidelity that made something ache in her chest.

"You've been watching us," she said.

He came to stand in the doorway between rooms, holding two clay cups. "The stars. Yes. Most of my life." He offered her a cup. She took it. "This is tea. I don't know if that —"

"I know what tea is." She had been to the mortal realm before, in better times, in the old centuries when the Aetheri still sometimes walked below. "I haven't had it in a long time."

He sat on a chest of rolled charts across from her. He was looking at her with the expression she'd seen on the bridge — not the slack wonder of someone encountering the impossible, but something more focused than that, the look of a man who had a question and was deciding whether to ask it.

"Ask," she said.

"Are they — the others." He glanced at the sky through the narrow window. "Is that what I'm seeing? The stars going out?"

She looked at her tea.

"Yes," she said.

The silence that followed was its own kind of weight.

"I noticed three weeks ago," he said. "The Lantern — your constellation — had seventeen stars. Now it has four." He paused. "I thought I was miscounting. Or that my lens was —" He stopped. "What's happening up there?"

She looked at him. Mortal, she thought. Finite. Thirty years of life and then the dark, and he had spent most of those years looking up at a civilization he didn't know existed, mapping it with devoted care, grieving losses he didn't understand.

Something about that broke her open a little.

"War," she said. "The Aetheri have been at war for fifty years. I've been — I was on the Council. The governing body. We were trying to negotiate peace between the two factions, the Solari and the Umbrathi." She stopped. "Seven days ago, the negotiations failed. Catastrophically."

"And you fell."

"I was pushed," she said. "By someone who thought removing me from the sky would end the Council's resistance." She looked at her hands, at the dimming light in them. "It may have worked. Without my wings, I can't return. And without me —"

"What do your wings do?"

"They process starlight. Without them I can't access my full power. I'm —" She searched for a mortal analogy. "I'm running on reserves. When the reserves are gone —"

"You'll die."

"I'll extinguish. Yes."

He absorbed this. She watched him absorb it — watched the information move through him, watched him sit with it and not look away from it, and thought that very few people, mortal or celestial, had that quality. The capacity to look at a hard thing straight.

"How long do you have?" he asked.

"At current rate?" She pressed her hand to her sternum. "Perhaps thirty days."

He nodded slowly. Then he stood up, went back to the fire, and refilled his cup. When he returned, he sat back down and looked at her with something resolved in his face.

"Then we have thirty days to find your wings," he said.

She stared at him. "We?"

"You're in my tower drinking my tea," he said simply. "And you have thirty days."

Something she could not name moved through her — a warmth that had nothing to do with starlight, a thing she was quite certain had never been in the celestial texts.

"You don't know what you're involving yourself in," she said.

"No," he agreed. "But I've been watching your people disappear for three weeks and doing nothing about it, and I'm done with that." His eyes were steady on hers. "Tell me where to start."

She looked at him for a long time — this mortal man with his plain name and his stone tower and his four hundred hand-mapped stars that no one else had charted — and felt the thirty days pressing against her like a countdown.

"The wings were taken by Maerath," she said. "The Solari general who had me pushed from the sky. He'll have them secured in the Upper Celestium, in the Solari stronghold."

"How do we get to the Upper Celestium?"

"There are ley-bridges. Invisible to mortals, usually. Convergence points where the sky-boundary thins." She paused. "I can find them, even diminished. Getting through them without wings —"

"We'll find a way," he said.

She should have told him it was impossible. She should have sent him back to his field-tending village and his handmade lens and his safe, finite, star-gazing life. She was an Aetheri. He was mortal. Between them lay every rule of celestial law, every boundary of existence, every vast unbridgeable distance between his world and hers.

She said none of that.

She said: "You'll need warmer clothes. The ley-bridges are cold."