[c=#2dba69]Elyra's Diary - Part 4
The Star of the Last Breath[/c]

[c=#e3aaeb][i]19th of Duskmoon, Year 342 of the Era of Remembrance[/i][/c]

The encounters have come faster these past few days, as though something, on the other side, sensed I was drawing near the end - or perhaps simply that time, too, was beginning to run short. I've stopped counting the nights without proper sleep, the inns where I only poke my head in to check for mail, the villages I pass through without even stopping to drink. My body still holds, but I can feel it's holding on something other than rest, now - some kind of urgency I hadn't felt since the day I learned about Kael.

One of them, just before collapsing, didn't speak of Kael. It spoke of a place: a hollow of blackened earth, three days' walk to the north, where nothing has grown in ten years and where even the birds refuse to fly over. "That's where it's gathering itself again," it breathed, before the light faded for the last time. "That's where he stopped it. That's where it waits for you."

I walked three days with almost no sleep, the ankh growing hotter against my chest with every step, until it became a constant burn, a second pulse laid over my own. The landscape changed long before I reached the place: the grass grew sparse, then vanished entirely, giving way to gray, packed earth, as though the ground itself had been holding its breath for ten years, waiting for this day.

I saw it from a distance, first - three skulls suspended above a base of blackened bones, motionless, as though asleep. Then it turned toward me, all three at once, and I understood it wasn't sleep. It was waiting. The same waiting I had carried for ten years, turned back against me.

I won't recount that fight in detail. Some things should only be described to those who lived them, and for once, I'd rather keep this for myself. I will only say that I was afraid - a fear different from the one ordinary undead bring, a fear born of the certainty that this thing already knew me, that it had had ten years to learn the name of anyone who might one day come to finish what Kael had started.

I will also say that at one point, at the height of the fight, as my arms trembled and I was no longer certain I could hold on to the end, I heard his voice - the real one, the one I hadn't heard again in ten years except in memory, distinct from all the borrowed echoes that had guided me this far:

"You don't need to finish what I started, Elyra. You just need to finish your own."

I don't know if it was truly him, or only what I needed to hear at that exact moment to keep my arms raised. I'm not sure the difference matters anymore, ten years on.

When the thing finally collapsed, in a burst of light that had nothing of the soft blue glow of the other encounters - harder, whiter, nearly blinding - I knew, before I even looked, that something had been left at the center of the crater it left behind.

A dark shard, dense, silent, fallen amid the ashes like a seed in the middle of a burned field.

"The ancients called it the Star of the Last Breath," a final voice murmured, gentler than all the others, almost a sigh of relief. "It is neither a key nor a trophy. It is a crystallized memory - your brother's, and that of everyone who held the line with him that day, condensed into a single thing that will never quite go dark again."

I picked it up with hands still trembling, more from relief than fear, this time.

I already know what I have left to do with this star - the last voice, before fading, breathed it to me like a final piece of advice rather than an order: seek out a tomb still inhabited by a powerful soul, a glow unlike any other, blue like the one that escaped the very first creature I crossed on this road, blue like Kael himself the last time I saw him alive. Not to throw it down. Not to set it carelessly upon the stone. To offer it, with faith, against that tomb, and wait - one last time - for something to answer me.

I no longer quite know what I'll do with all of this once that last gesture is done - with this silence finally made whole, with these ten years I will no longer carry entirely alone. But I know I am no longer a traveler hunting creatures down endless roads. I am his sister, and I have finally come to claim what he promised me before he died, even if he himself likely never knew in what form that promise would come to be kept.

The knowledge the living should not possess, he used to say. I believe, at last, I understand why we were the exception.
