The Dust of Kaelenor
Liam felt it like a phantom limb, an ache for a place he'd never once seen, never walked. Not in his waking life, anyway. It was Kaelenor, or what was left of it, a kingdom rumored lost to the earth long before history decided to jot itself down proper. He found it in the periphery of dusty texts, in the footnotes of forgotten scholars who'd dismissed it as myth. But for Liam, in the quiet hum of the university library, surrounded by the smell of old paper and stale coffee, Kaelenor was as real as the blood thrumming behind his eyes. A longing, sharp and persistent, gnawed at him, a longing for something just out of reach, something ancient and deeply, impossibly familiar.
