Page 93 of Stars May Burn

Despite everything, his words caused a flutter in my stomach. I mumbled a response, then turned back to Callum. “I’ve made you a new case of different sedatives to try. These are very strong, so please be careful not to let any of the liquid touch your skin.”

His grin widened. “Excellent. I always enjoy the spice of added danger.”

I gave him a strange look before curiosity got the better of me, and I looked around the room. It was small and circular with a domed paneled ceiling. The plaster walls were peeling. There were no windows, but so many kryalcomy lanterns hung from the walls, it wasn’t particularly dark.

I pressed my hands up against a glass cabinet, the glass so thick it seemed excessive. There was no door or lock and the glass seemed sunk into the floor. “What is that?” I pointed to the harness inside hanging on a simple stand. It consisted of two wide leather belts designed to crisscross the chest. In the middle, as if to hang above a person’s heart, was a huge, polished stone, or possibly a glass dome. Silvery light seemed to shift within it.

Kasten growled behind me, making me startle. How did he move so silently? Callum had never told me that he’d invented kryalcomy that did that. “Something Callum should have never made, and something that should be destroyed.”

Callum shifted; even he looked a little uneasy as he surveyed it. “Nobody except us two—well, three now—knows this exists. I’m saving it for an emergency.”

My curiosity increased so much, it was painful. “Emergency? You mean more of an emergency than Kasten having to retake Whitehill with only two thousand men?”

Callum nodded and scratched the back of his neck. “Yeah, it would have to be worse than that.”

Kasten strode up to loom beside me, his arms crossed. Displeasure radiated out from him. “There would never be an emergency bad enough to justify this.” He flicked his hand at the harness with a disgusted expression.

Callum shrugged. “Or if Kasten decides he actually wants to win the war and have it over and done with.”

I turned to them in shock. “That device is powerful enough to win the war against Kollenstar?”

Kasten’s face was stone, but the corner of Callum’s lips flicked up as he nodded toward my husband. “In his hands, it would be.”

I turned to the general. “I don’t understand. What is it? Why can’t you use it?”

Kasten pointed at the harness with a sneer. “If the king or Lord Lyrason knew that thing even existed,” he punctuated his words by stabbing the air with his finger, “we would open the floodgates to an evil I can’t even begin to comprehend. Nobody should have that much power. I could destroy the armies of soulless, but then Fenland’s royals would want it for themselves. They would learn how to make more…and they would destroy the world.”

Callum folded his arms. “Or you could step up, rule this country, and protect this power, keeping its origins secret.”

Kasten scowled at him. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

I swallowed, looking back at the simple device, then turned to Callum. “What is it?”

He sighed, racking his hand through his golden curls. “It’s my greatest invention. No one else has even dreamed of it, yet it must sit here, useless.”

I could almost hear Kasten grinding his teeth.

Callum reached out to touch the glass as if in reverence. “It channels the power of stars.”

I blinked. “What?”

Callum went to a switch on one wall with a green glowing light and flicked it up. The doomed roof opened up like a cracked egg to the night sky and thousands of stars. A series of mirrors bounced their weak light from all angles, concentrating it into a faint beam that led to the glowing stone.

“Starlight? We already have kryalcomy that channels light. And more powerful light than that.”

Callum shook his head with one finger in the air. “Not light. Power. Did you know that stars are countless millions of miles away? So far away that it can take years for their light to reach us. Some of those stars are already dead, exploded into fiery cataclysms. The power of each one is close to infinite, enough to power the birth of new stars. I capture just a little of that power, but within it, we touch infinity. We store infinity.”

I blinked as his words trailed off into something close to worship as he stared at the stone and the pale light it absorbed.

I stepped closer to him. “What is it made of? This substance that can channel such power? What stone?”

Callum’s face twisted into a strange smile. “I discovered it by accident, then it took me a few years to perfect. It is a secret I’ve not even told Kasten.”

“I don’t want to know,” he grumbled.

I looked at my husband and met his gaze. I saw the weight there. The distaste and…fear. “This is what you’re so eager to hide. Callum’s other inventions, too, but mostly this. This is what they would kill you for.”

Kasten tilted his head up slightly. “I will not watch the world burn over this.”

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