THE LAST STARKEEPER

Chapter 5: Above the Sky

The ley-bridge was everything she had warned him about and things she hadn't.

Kael walked through the wavering point between hills and felt the world change around him the way a page changes when you turn it — not gradually, but in a single instant of commitment. The cold hit first: absolute, structural cold, the cold of a space that had never contained warmth and saw no reason to start. Then the wrongness — a pressure on every nerve that said you do not belong here, the mortal body's honest and accurate assessment of a space not designed for it.

He kept walking.

Beside him, Nyra moved differently on the bridge than she had on the road — less like someone conserving resources, more like something returning to its element. The light at her fingertips strengthened slightly. Her bearing changed. She was, he understood, still diminished — critically, dangerously diminished — but here, closer to the sky-boundary, she was less so. Like a deep-sea creature returning to the upper ocean. Still wounded. Somewhat more herself.

The bridge emerged onto a platform of what appeared to be compressed cloud — not the airy, insubstantial cloud of looking up, but cloud with architecture, cloud that supported weight and held shape, luminous from within.

Above them, the sky was not blue. The sky was everything: deep violet at the edges, gold at some impossible middle layer, and above that — above that, where his mind struggled to hold the scale of it — a darkness scattered with the light of every star he had ever mapped and ten thousand more.

He stopped. He couldn't help it.

"The Celestium," Nyra said beside him.

"It's —" He had no words. He was a man whose entire profession was words applied to what he saw in the sky, and he had nothing. "It's enormous."

"The visible sky from your realm is approximately — a metaphor would help." She considered. "Imagine you could see only one room of a vast house. The room is beautiful. But it is one room."

"And this is the house."

"This is the house."

He stood there, his mortal brain trying to contain the scale of it, the specific quality of the light that was not quite like anything below the sky-boundary — cleaner, somehow, and older, a light that had never been interrupted.

"We need to move," she said. Her voice was careful. "The bridge will close at mid-morning."

They moved.

The first Solari patrol found them twenty minutes later.

Nyra heard them first — her celestial senses still sharp even diminished — and pulled Kael behind a cloud-formation before he'd registered the sound. The Solari were three: tall, severe, armored in compressed light, their own wings — vast, gold-edged, terrible — folded close against them. They moved through the Celestium with the authority of an occupying force.

Kael pressed against the cloud-formation beside her, not breathing. She had one hand on his arm, and he felt her stillness — the controlled, absolute stillness of someone managing a great deal at great cost.

The patrol passed.

She exhaled. He did too.

"Solari guards," she said, very quietly. "Maerath has extended his patrols into the neutral Celestium layers. That's new." Something moved in her face. "He's consolidating."

"Quickly?"

"Quickly." She looked at the direction the patrol had gone. "We have less time than I thought."

He looked at her — at the light in her hands, which had flared briefly and was settling again, and at the expression she was wearing, which was the expression of someone doing a calculation and not fully liking the result.

"How much less?" he asked.

Her eyes met his. In the light of the Celestium, they were fully inhuman — the silver-white of a star at zenith, the blue of deepest space, and in them something vast and very old and, he thought, trying very hard not to show that it was afraid.

"I'll be honest with you," she said.

"Please."

"If Maerath is moving this fast, he won't keep my wings secured in the stronghold indefinitely. He'll destroy them — eliminate the possibility of my return permanently." She paused. "Which means our thirty days may be closer to ten."

Ten days.

He had known her for one.

"Then we move faster," he said.

She looked at him. That expression again — the recalibrating, the adjustment, the look of someone encountering a variable they hadn't accounted for.

"You're very calm," she said.

"I'm extremely not calm," he said. "But calm is the only useful thing to be right now." He looked at the sky above them — the infinite, impossible, magnificent sky that he had looked up at for thirty years and was now, somehow, standing inside. "Which direction is the stronghold?"

She pointed.

They went.