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The caravan disappeared slowly into the white horizon beyond the hills before he could wave back.
Then Caelyn was alone.
The silence after the caravan departed was suffocating.
Even the abbey seemed altered already.
Every corridor carried traces of her absence. Every observatory reminded him of her laughter, her voice, her relentless curiosity. Even the resonance beneath the earth sounded mournful.
Caelyn wandered the cliffs until dusk without realizing where his feet carried him.
Only when night settled fully over the sea did he finally stop near the old western overlook where the abbey grave markers faced the horizon.
Snow-covered leaves crunched behind him. He could tell it was Sister Agatha by her uneven gait.
“You were not at supper,” she stated, her tone even with a hint of chiding.
“I wasn’t hungry,” he grumbled.
The Sister clucked her tongue. “You’re never hungry when miserable. Which, fortunately, has not been often in all the turnings you’ve been here. Otherwise you’d be nothing but a twig.”
Caelyn remained unmoving as he stared out toward the sea, not rising to her attempt at provoking him.
For a long while, Agatha stood beside him before finally breaking the silence. “You cannot remain half-untethered forever.”
A line crossed his brow before he furrowed it. “What does that even mean?”
The elder Sister turned and studied him with her sharp gaze, squinting at him beneath the lantern light.
“You've spent your entire life belonging nowhere but here.” Her voice was calm. “You say you don’t remember your surname. No lineage to speak of. No place within the world beyond what Lumenshire allowed you to build for yourself in safety.”
Caelyn looked away. She was right.
He had always just been Caelyn and nothing more. No history beyond the one he'd begun after arriving in the abbey as a child. No name of his own, having abandoned it long ago. Little coin beyond what he'd earned here.
This was the only home he knew.
Agatha looked at him for a heartbeat, her knowing eyes piercing him. “You love her.”
Not a question.
Caelyn closed his eyes against the truth of it and winced. The words felt like she had slapped him across the face.
“Yes,” he breathed, the admission carrying off on the wind.
Sister Agatha hummed a contemplative noise as she nodded, but she said nothing else. He was grateful for that.
When he opened his eyes again, Agatha had left, and the northern road beyond Lumenshire had vanished, the darkness of night having swallowed it whole.
Elowynn was gone.
And somewhere within the aching space of his heart she left behind, Caelyn knew that she had taken his sense of home with her.
Chapter Eleven
“The farther one walks from home, the harder it becomes to remember which direction hope lies.”
— Pilgrim’s saying
