You were born in the sky," the Rememberer said. "Not the sky you see when you look up—the sky beyond the sky, the place between worlds, the space where stars are born and gods go to die."
Her voice was soft, but it filled the vast hall, echoing off shelves that held the knowledge of ages. The words seemed to hang in the air after she spoke them, visible almost, like threads of light weaving together into a tapestry that told the story of his life.
Kaelen listened with his whole body, every nerve alive, every muscle still. Beside him, Mira sat cross-legged, her hands loose in her lap, her eyes never leaving the Rememberer's face. He could feel the tension in her, the thousand-year weight of waiting finally coming to an end. This was the moment she had been walking toward since before either of them was born—or at least, since before he was born, since before she died.
"The people of that place call themselves the Aethelings. Children of the upper air. They are old, older than any race on this world, and they have watched us from above for longer than we have had words to describe watching. They do not interfere. They do not descend. They simply... observe."
"Until I fell."
"Until you fell." The Rememberer nodded. "But you didn't fall, Kaelen. You were thrown. By your own father, the king of the Aethelings, who saw something in you that frightened him more than anything in his long, long life."
Kaelen felt the words like blows, each one landing somewhere deep inside him. His father. A king. Someone who had looked at him, his own child, and been so afraid that he'd thrown him away like garbage, like a thing to be discarded. He had spent seven years wondering who he was, where he came from, why he was alone—and now he knew. He was alone because his father had made him alone.
"What did he see?"
"The same thing you see when you look in the black glass. The same thing the hunger saw when it looked at you. The same thing that made Mira able to touch you when she can touch no one else." The Rememberer leaned forward, and her black eyes burned with a light that wasn't fire. "You carry something inside you, Kaelen. Something that doesn't belong in this world or any other. Something that was put there before you were born, by powers that should never have meddled in the making of children."
"What is it?"
"I don't know."
The words hung in the air between them, heavy with implication. The Rememberer—who remembered all things, who had seen the birth of stars and the death of worlds—didn't know.
"You don't know," Kaelen repeated. The words felt strange in his mouth, impossible. If she didn't know, then who did? If she couldn't tell him, then what was the point of coming here?
"I know what it is not. It is not magic, not in any form I've seen across ten thousand years of watching. It is not divine, not the spark of any god I've met in all my travels through the spaces between. It is not demonic, not the taint of any hell I've visited in my dreams. It is... other. New. Something that has never existed before in all the long history of all the worlds I've watched." She shook her head slowly, and for the first time, Kaelen saw something like fear in her ancient eyes. "Your father threw you from the sky because he was afraid. And if a king of the Aethelings is afraid, Kaelen, then the rest of us should be terrified."
Kaelen looked down at his hands—ordinary hands, calloused from training, scarred from practice. Hands that could touch a girl no one else could touch. Hands that held a piece of the Glass Throne and felt nothing but cold. "What do I do?"
"Find the ones who made you." The Rememberer's voice was soft, but it carried the weight of command. "Not your parents—they were only vessels. Find the ones who put that thing inside you. They're still out there, somewhere, in the spaces between worlds. They'll know what it is, and what it wants, and why they chose you to carry it."
"How do I find them?"
"You follow the falling." The Rememberer looked up, through the stone of the tower, through the sand and the sky, toward something only she could see. "The stars are falling, Kaelen. More every night. They're falling because something is calling them—something in this world, something that doesn't belong here. And where they fall, the barriers between worlds grow thin. Thin enough to pass through, if you know how."
Mira spoke for the first time since they'd sat down. Her voice was steady, but Kaelen could hear the fear beneath it—a fear she'd been carrying for so long it had become part of her, woven into the fabric of her existence. "What about me?"
The Rememberer turned to her, and her expression softened—softened into something like grief, like love, like the look a mother gives a child who has been lost too long.
"You, little ghost, are a tragedy." She reached out and touched Mira's cheek, and Mira flinched—not away, but toward, as if she'd been starving for touch her whole existence. "You were alive once, in a city that has long since turned to dust. You loved, and were loved, and died young, as so many did in those days. But something happened when you died—something that shouldn't have been possible. A piece of you refused to leave. Refused to go on to whatever waits beyond. That piece has been walking ever since, alone and forgotten, for longer than most civilizations have lasted."
Mira's eyes were bright—with tears, Kaelen realized, though he hadn't thought she could cry. "Why? Why couldn't I leave?"
"Because you were waiting." The Rememberer smiled through her own tears. "Waiting for someone who could touch you. Waiting for someone who carried the same weight you carry. Waiting for Kaelen."
They looked at each other then, across the space between them, and Kaelen understood something he hadn't understood before: they weren't two separate people who happened to meet on a road. They were two halves of something, two pieces of a puzzle that had been waiting thousands of years to be solved.
"You're part of this," he said. "Part of whatever's inside me."
"I think so." Mira's voice was wonder. "I think I've been waiting for you since before you were born. I think—" She stopped, her eyes widening. "I think I remember."
"Remember what?"
"The ones who made you." She looked at the Rememberer, at Kaelen, back at the Rememberer. "I saw them. When I died. I saw them watching. They were... pleased. As if my death was part of their plan. As if everything—my whole life, my whole death, my whole endless walking—was just leading to this moment."
The Rememberer nodded slowly. "Then you know what you have to do."
"Yes." Mira stood, and for the first time, Kaelen saw something like purpose in her winter-sky eyes. "We follow the falling. We find the ones who made him. And we make them tell us why."