Chapter 253: Cael Athis
Cael Athis looked exactly as Rohan remembered it, and somehow nothing like he remembered it at all.
The Rustwake’s descent carried them down through the same thin, ash-hazed atmosphere he’d once thought would be the last sky he ever knew, the same violet-tinged light bleeding across a horizon of grey, wind-scoured wasteland stretching out beneath them in every direction. He’d spent months learning to survive beneath that light, learning its moods, its dangers, its rare, hard-won mercies. Seeing it again now, after everything the Halcyon Span and the Wraithfall Fringe and the fracture at Ashford had shown him, it looked smaller than he remembered — not less dangerous, exactly, but somehow less vast, less final, than it had felt the day he’d first opened his eyes on this planet with nothing but a spear and a goddess’s uncertain mercy.
He pressed his palm flat against the cockpit’s viewport, watching the familiar terrain resolve into sharper detail as they descended — the distant, jagged silhouette of the Ashen Marches, the pale scatter of bone-white slab fields where he’d fought his first real battle against a wolf that should have killed him, the thin grey ribbons of ash still drifting sideways in the wind exactly as they always had. Seven months ago, every one of those features had represented a genuine, immediate threat to his survival. Now, they simply looked like home — a strange, difficult, hard-won kind of home, but home nonetheless.
I never thought I’d miss this place. I never thought I’d feel anything but relief at leaving it behind. And yet here I am, and some part of me is genuinely glad to see it again.
"Doesn’t look like much, does it," Corven observed, guiding the Rustwake down through the last of the atmospheric turbulence with the same careful precision he brought to everything. "For a world that apparently changed your whole life."
"It didn’t look like much to me either, the first time," Rohan admitted. "Took me a while to understand what it was actually teaching me."
Dr. Farr, seated in the Rustwake’s cramped third chair, studied the approaching wasteland with an expression of genuine scientific curiosity that hadn’t dimmed at all across three weeks of transit. "I confess I’m curious to see the settlement itself. Everything you’ve described about Veyrhold suggests a community considerably more resilient than most consortium-supported colonies I’ve studied, and they’ve managed it with a fraction of the resources."
"You’ll see for yourself soon enough," Rohan said, watching the horizon for the first signs of the Ashen Marches, for the buried, half-hidden markers that would tell him he was close.
They set the Rustwake down at the same merchant landing field where Shuttle Three had once carried him away inside a stabiliser casing, the ash kicking up in slow, familiar clouds around the hull, and Rohan felt his chest tighten with an anticipation that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with a homecoming he’d genuinely never expected to have the chance to make.
He sat a moment longer in the cockpit after the engines had fully powered down, simply looking out at the field where his entire desperate escape had once begun, remembering the exact texture of the fear that had carried him through the drainage cut, through the charge scan, through every terrifying, uncertain step of a plan that had, against every reasonable expectation, actually worked.
I came through here half-convinced I’d never survive the attempt. Now I’m coming back through the same field with a spear that’s carried me across an entire universe, and people at my side who never had to become my friends but chose to anyway.
"You coming, kid?" Corven asked, already unstrapping himself from the pilot’s seat. "Or are you planning on admiring the view from in here a while longer?"
"Coming," Rohan said, and rose to gather his spear.
The walk from the landing field to Veyrhold’s outer wall took the better part of two hours on foot, the same route Rohan remembered from his earliest days at the settlement, though he found himself reading the terrain now with a considerably more practiced eye than the desperate, disoriented boy who’d first stumbled along it.
"You’re certain this is safe?" Dr. Farr asked, eyeing the ash-scoured landscape with a wariness Rohan recognised from his own first weeks here. "No hostile wildlife, no environmental hazards we should be watching for?"
"Skarn packs, mostly, and the occasional glassmaw if you’re unlucky enough to catch one during a squall," Rohan said. "I know this stretch of ground well enough to read the signs. We’ll be fine."
Corven kept one hand near his sidearm regardless, old fringe instincts clearly refusing to fully relax despite Rohan’s reassurance, and it was Corven, in fact, who first spotted the outer watch — a lone figure atop Veyrhold’s buried wall, silhouetted against the violet sky, weapon already tracking their approach with the same disciplined wariness Rohan remembered instilling in every watch rotation he’d ever stood.
"Hold there!" the figure called, voice carrying clear across the ash-scoured ground. "Identify yourselves, or —"
The voice cut off abruptly, and Rohan felt his heart catch in his chest as he recognised, even at this distance, the particular shape of the figure’s stance.
"Jorren!" he called back, raising both hands, spear held clearly visible rather than threatening. "It’s me! It’s Rohan!"
There was a long, suspended moment of silence, and then the figure atop the wall moved with sudden, urgent haste, disappearing from view before reappearing moments later at the settlement’s outer gate, breaking into a run that covered the remaining distance faster than Rohan had ever seen the stoic shieldbearer move.
"Rohan?" Jorren’s voice carried disbelief, wonder, and something rawer beneath both as he closed the final stretch between them. "We thought — Bryan said the merchant ledgers showed no record of you boarding any registered transport, no trace of you anywhere in consortium logs. We thought you’d died out there, lost to the Marches, or worse."
"I’m alive," Rohan said, throat tight with an emotion he hadn’t fully anticipated feeling this strongly.
"I made it. I found what I was looking for."