The first thing Zahra’kael noticed was the air.

  It tasted thin.

  Not thin in the way a high mountain thinned it—no, this was different. This was a world that had never learned to breathe mana. A place where the atmosphere carried only the smallest trace of ambient power, like a candle that had been snuffed hours ago and still held a memory of warmth in the wax.

  She stepped through the gate anyway.

  The seam in reality flexed around her bulk like a wound refusing to close. Lightning crawled along the edges of her chitin as she emerged, each footfall landing with a slow inevitability—weight settling into new ground, claiming it. The surface beneath her wasn’t stone in the way Nytherian stone was stone; it was processed, layered, cut and poured into shapes that implied control. Roadway. Foundation. Human geometry.

  Quaint.

  Primitive.

  Useful.

  Her towering body—twenty meters of storm-veined carapace and segmented mass—cast a shadow that swallowed the street. The gate behind her pulsed with a dull, obedient throb, feeding off the structure of the breach. She listened to it like a mother listened to a sleeping child. Stable. Anchored. Hungry.

  Good.

  Her subordinates poured out ahead of her as ordered—smaller Angarians, swift and disciplined, clinging to vertical surfaces with insect grace. Their limbs clicked on metal and concrete. Their mouths moved in their own tongue, a sibilant cadence of confirmation and positioning.

  Husks followed.

  They came in wet waves, pallid and wrong, a swarm of meat given direction but not purpose. They didn’t carry souls. They didn’t carry pride. Their eyes were blank, their skin too taut, their joints poorly remembered by whatever pool birthed them. They moved like puppets with the strings cut—falling forward into motion because forward was all they knew.

  Zahra’kael approved.

  Husks were not meant to win. Husks were meant to fill space and steal time. They were meant to press living beings into corners and exhaust them. They were meant to die.

  They were a product. A tool.

  And tools did not require mercy.

  She raised one clawed limb and the lightning along her arm brightened—an unspoken signal that carried through her host like a pulse. Her voice followed it, slow and absolute.

  “Bring me anything alive.”

  Her subordinate nearest the breach—Qasir-Veth, plated in conductive ridges and bred for direct violence—tilted his head as if the instruction were too simple to honor. But he bowed and snapped a command into the swarm.

  Zahra’kael’s gaze swept the horizon.

  The world beyond the ruined town stretched into open desert, pale and harsh, a flat expanse broken by distant mountains. Those mountains caught her attention immediately—not because they were beautiful, but because they were tall. Because they were stable. Because they were away from the chaos of the breach, away from whatever this world’s weak little denizens might attempt in the name of defense.

  A lair could root there.

  A breeding site could anchor there.

  Eggs required heat. Pressure. Safety.

  Her abdomen tightened with a satisfied thought. She could already feel the rhythm of future broods, already imagine the pools dug into rock, the nutrient slurry simmering under storm-charged webs.

  This world would feed her.

  This world would become her.

  She gestured again, and Nashira Threx—a thinner, more elegant Angarian with air-lightning ripples in her limbs—scuttled closer, waiting.

  “Harvest,” Zahra’kael said. “Do not distinguish. Capture. Return.”

  “Yes, Matriarch,” Nashira replied, voice smooth as silk drawn over a blade.

  Zahra’kael’s eyes—deep, reflective, and old—shifted toward Ish’kara.

  The mother-in-waiting moved with careful grace, her form smaller than the Broodmother’s but unmistakably ambitious. Her posture spoke of restraint, of a hunger that had learned patience. Zahra’kael could smell the intent on her like blood in water.

  Let her want.

  Want sharpened obedience.

  “Ish’kara,” Zahra’kael said, letting the name carry weight. “Lead the forward harvest. Take shock troops. Take husks. Bring me bodies.”

  Ish’kara’s mouth moved in a smile that did not touch her eyes. “As you command.”

  Zahra’kael watched her go, watched her disappear into the stream of movement pouring into the town. Watched the husks follow with the mindless devotion of flesh.

  Then something else brushed her senses.

  A pause in the world.

  A place where the thin mana of this planet did not simply remain thin—but failed entirely, as if a section of reality had been cut away and the edges left raw.

  Zahra’kael’s limbs stilled.

  Her lightning quieted.

  Her mouth parted slightly, tasting the air again.

  There was a gap.

  Not a force.

  Not an energy.

  An absence.

  As if someone had taken a clean cut through mana itself and left a hole the world couldn’t patch.

  Her gaze turned toward the town.

  She could not see the source. Buildings and smoke and distance obscured line of sight.

  But she felt it.

  A cutout against a blue sky.

  A void-shaped wrongness.

  Zahra’kael’s expression—if it could be called expression—tightened into focused curiosity.

  Interesting.

  —

  Deep underground, concrete and steel formed a different kind of lair.

  Fluorescent lighting bleached the Tactical Operations Center into sharp edges and pale faces. The air inside was cooled and recycled until it tasted like nothing at all—just a clean emptiness that made human sweat feel more insulting.

  General Thomas Caldwell stood in front of a wall of screens and did not move.

  The feed showed the gate like a gash in the world. It showed the town beyond—Primm, Nevada—broken open by something no one had trained for. It showed a shape stepping through that bent the eye just by existing: a massive spider-like monstrosity, storm-charged, towering, slow with confidence.

  Sixty feet tall.

  Thomas stared at it the way a man stared at an incoming meteor.

  He didn’t blink often. He didn’t speak quickly. His calm was not comfort. It was discipline.

  “What’s the status of air weapons?” he asked.

  A technician—young, pale, hands moving too fast over a console—answered without turning. “Kiowas are lifting. Apaches are spinning up. Blackhawks are en route for evac and insertion. We have A-10s on standby pending authorization.”

  “Authorization from who?” Thomas asked, though he already knew.

  “From the President,” another voice replied. “We still haven’t reached him, sir.”

  Thomas’s jaw tightened, the smallest visible sign of irritation.

  He leaned closer to the screen, watching the broodmother’s shadow swallow the street. Watching smaller shapes scuttle around her. Watching waves of pale drones surge forward.

  “Call again,” Thomas said. “And when you do, tell them the situation has escalated into the unrealistic—and yet it is still here.”

  A pause.

  Then: “Yes, sir.”

  Rachel Monroe stood a few steps behind him, her arms folded tight against herself without realizing she’d done it. Her eyes tracked the footage with an intensity that bordered on reverence. She was not a soldier by nature. She was an analyst by necessity. But she had seen this kind of impossibility before.

  Coyote Hills.

  Police reports that read like fiction.

  Cuts through asphalt that didn’t fracture so much as vanish.

  Matter missing as if reality had been edited.

  And now, watching the map overlay on the feed, watching the signatures spiking and dying, she felt the shape of something aligning in her mind.

  Elaine Caldwell stood off to the side, phone in hand, her face lit by screen glow. She looked like she belonged in command rooms. Like she had been born in places where people made decisions that hurt other people for a living.

  Her eyes never left the broodmother.

  Opportunity shimmered in her gaze like oil on water.

  Thomas didn’t look at her. He didn’t need to. He could feel her presence in the room like a knife that had learned to smile.

  “Rotor ETA?” he asked again.

  “Thirty minutes,” the technician repeated. “Best case.”

  Thomas watched the broodmother lift an arm. Watched lightning crawl along her limb like a living thing.

  Thirty minutes was a lifetime.

  Or nothing.

  “Keep the Global Hawk on her,” Thomas said. “Loiter pattern. Don’t lose the feed.”

  “Drone feed is stable,” came the reply.

  Thomas exhaled slowly through his nose. “For now.”

  —

  Back in Primm, the air tasted like pulverized concrete and burnt storms.

  Eric turned toward Celeste with a face that looked carved out of anger and exhaustion. The glow in his eyes had steadied into something almost calm, but it was the calm of a blade—still, sharp, ready.

  He pointed without hesitation.

  “Get these people out. All of them.”

  Celeste’s head angled toward him, hair stirring in the wind she barely noticed she was making.

  “Mike,” Eric said. “Michelle. The racing team. Any civilians still breathing. Every last one.”

  Celeste’s jaw tightened.

  “Stop holding back,” Eric continued, voice low but absolute. “No more. We’re done playing.”

  A faint tremor rolled through the ground from the direction of the gate, as if to punctuate him.

  Eric didn’t flinch.

  “Whatever just came through needs to die,” he said. “And it needs to die now. Because it’s going to cause more damage than I can stop if you people are still in the way.”

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  His gaze flicked past her to the shattered streets full of fleeing silhouettes and scattered clusters of terrified survivors. The smell of sweat and fear mixed with dust so thick it clung to skin and turned lips gritty when you licked them.

  “I will take as many of these things down as I can,” Eric said. “But you’re getting everyone out. I don’t care how you do it. Get them safe. Then rejoin me.”

  Celeste opened her mouth—maybe to argue, maybe to demand he stop burning himself alive with overclocked conversion—but Eric’s stare pinned her in place.

  This wasn’t a request.

  This was command.

  Celeste swallowed something and nodded once. “Understood.”

  Eric turned away before she could see what it cost him to say it.

  The racing team still stood close enough to hear.

  Elena Cruz had dust on her lashes and blood on her forearm from a cut she didn’t remember getting. Her eyes stayed on Eric the way a person stared at a wildfire—fascinated, terrified, trying to measure the distance between them and doom.

  Celeste approached them with a speed that didn’t look like running. It looked like wind deciding it had a destination.

  “Grab everything you can,” she said. “Grab everyone you can. Get out of here. Do not come back.”

  Elena’s chin lifted. “We’re not doing that. This is—this is our town.”

  Celeste’s eyes narrowed, patience fraying.

  Eric didn’t look at Elena.

  He lifted his left hand out to his side like he was swatting a fly.

  Void answered.

  A beam snapped from his palm and cut through the already-ruined building to his left. There was no explosion, no theatrical collapse. The world simply lost a section of itself—an entire bite carved out in a clean, screaming absence that left the air rushing to fill the void.

  Dust whipped sideways. Loose debris clattered as if startled.

  The smell of ozone sharpened so suddenly Elena tasted metal.

  Eric lowered his hand and finally looked at her.

  “You don’t run fast enough,” he said.

  His voice did not rise.

  “You don’t jump high enough. You don’t punch hard enough.”

  He gestured toward the gate with a tilt of his chin, the broodmother’s shadow visible in the far distance between torn buildings.

  “That is about to be all over the place,” Eric said. “And when I move, I’m not carving only what I mean to carve. I am going to riddle this entire area with holes. Gouges. Cuts. I am going to unmake everything between me and that gate.”

  Elena’s throat bobbed as she swallowed.

  Eric’s eyes held hers. There was anger there, yes—but also something else: an exhausted refusal to let more innocent people die because pride demanded they stand in the wrong place.

  “I don’t want innocent lives caught up in this,” he said. “It’s already bad enough you have to see it. I’m not adding to it.”

  Elena tried to speak again—tried to find an argument that didn’t sound like a child insisting fire wasn’t hot.

  Eric continued, voice steady, mercilessly logical.

  “There is no reconciliation with what’s coming through that gate. No conversation. No talking it out. If their goal is killing us all, there’s no conversation. If their goal is stealing minerals, there’s still no conversation. They will kill us to do that too.”

  He paused, the smallest crack in his composure showing as grief pushed up behind his words like an aftershock.

  “Killing people is not an obstacle to them,” he said. “It’s background noise.”

  Then, quietly: “Go.”

  Elena’s shoulders sank—not in defeat, but in acceptance.

  She turned to her team. “Alright,” she said hoarsely. “Load up. We’re rolling out. Now.”

  Jamal looked like he wanted to argue on principle. Raj looked like he wanted to keep filming until his camera melted.

  They moved anyway.

  Celeste watched them go with eyes that didn’t soften.

  Not because she didn’t care.

  Because caring didn’t change physics.

  She turned back to Eric, and for a moment the wind around her sharpened into something edged.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  Eric gave a humorless smile. “Sure.”

  Then he launched.

  The street became a line.

  Eric became motion.

  He hit the first cluster of husks like a thrown blade. Void constructs flared from his hands in jagged arcs, overfed and untuned. Anything they touched ceased to hold itself together. Husks disassembled into ash before they even registered pain. The ash didn’t scatter naturally—it flowed toward him, drawn into his aura like iron filings toward a magnet, stripped into raw alignment and swallowed.

  He didn’t slow.

  He used tethers like a man using breath.

  Snap—anchor to a streetlight.

  Snap—anchor to a building corner.

  Snap—anchor to a parked car half-buried in rubble.

  He swung through the air with violent efficiency, feet barely touching the ground except when he needed traction to accelerate again.

  Seventy miles per hour.

  Not sprinting.

  Hunting.

  He ran the length of Primm’s shattered main road, cutting down anything Nytherian that moved: husks, true goblins pushed forward as meat, Angarians clinging to walls and street signs like living knives.

  He wasn’t methodical.

  He was the beast within.

  On the Global Hawk feed, Eric wasn’t a man.

  He was a vector.

  A bright, moving line on an overlay that didn’t understand what it was seeing. The drone’s thermal mapping struggled—heat signatures spiked and vanished, whole clusters of targets blinking out like someone had erased portions of the map.

  A technician leaned forward, eyes bloodshot from staring too long. “Ground speed—seventy-one miles per hour,” he said, voice cracking with disbelief. “Seventy-five—he just spiked to seventy-five.”

  Rachel Monroe’s breath caught. “He’s not fleeing,” she murmured.

  Thomas Caldwell didn’t answer. His gaze remained fixed on the sweep pattern forming across the grid.

  Eric hit one end of town, cut up a block, and doubled back.

  A switchback.

  Like a mountain road carved into a cliff face.

  He cleared a corridor, changed elevation—changed block—then came back through, leaving behind a path of absence.

  “He’s… sweeping,” someone said. “He’s clearing blocks.”

  Thomas’s jaw tightened. “He’s building a battlefield.”

  On-screen, Eric slammed into an Angarian mid-leap. He didn’t simply strike it—he grabbed it by the back of the skull and drove its face into the side of a building as he ran, dragging it along concrete. Sparks and dust flew. The Angarian’s limbs flailed, chitin screeching against stone.

  Then the void flared and the creature’s head and upper torso became ash, pulled into Eric’s aura.

  Only a severed portion—one leg, half an arm—tumbled away, landing on the street and twitching as if it still didn’t understand it was dead. The cut edge of it shimmered with a faint, hungry distortion. Reality around the severed line looked thinner, wrong. Not visible as a color—visible as a lack of sense, like staring at a word you knew was misspelled but couldn’t say why.

  Thomas watched the severed limb twitch and then begin to eat itself, the cut edge destabilizing the remaining structure with patient inevitability.

  He didn’t know the science yet.

  But he knew it wasn’t good.

  “Do we have any on-ground assets in range?” he asked.

  “Negative. Thirty minutes out.”

  Thomas’s eyes stayed on the screen. “Then we’re watching a man reshape a city with his bare hands.”

  Elaine Caldwell stood a few paces away, phone in hand. Her lips pressed together as if she were already writing the story she intended to tell the world later.

  Rachel glanced at her. “Ma’am—”

  Elaine didn’t look over. “Not now.”

  On-screen, Eric hit another cluster.

  He didn’t carve them one by one.

  He gathered them.

  A tether snapped from his hand and speared an Angarian clinging to a building’s third story. The line stretched impossibly as Eric kept running, the void cord pulling taut like a cable under tension.

  At the same time he drove his shoulder into another Angarian in the street, his fist snapping forward. The second impact wasn’t just a punch—it was a connection. The tether bit into the second creature too, linking them, stretching them apart like a rubber band drawn to its limit.

  Then Eric released.

  The void snapped them together.

  The two bodies collided with horrific speed, chitin cracking, limbs tangling—and in the instant they met, Eric’s overfed construct expanded into a broad, concave plane of absence.

  It did not slice.

  It did not crush.

  It erased.

  The pair vanished into ash and light. The earthen-brown pulse that followed surged back into Eric’s aura, visible even on the drone feed as a brief, warm flare threaded through gold.

  Rachel felt her stomach drop. “He’s… converting them,” she whispered.

  Thomas didn’t look away. “He’s feeding.”

  On the far side of the breach, Zahra’kael felt it happen like a nerve being cut.

  Not pain.

  Loss.

  Her forward lines—her hunters, her harrowers, her tools—went dark in clusters. Entire threads of connection ceased at once. Where she should have felt the subtle, comforting weight of her brood’s presence in the field, she felt holes.

  Gaps.

  As if someone had taken a bite out of the world’s mana fabric and left her staring at the missing piece.

  Zahra’kael turned her head, lightning dimming along her limbs.

  The gap was moving.

  It was sweeping.

  It was eating.

  Her sensory array reached outward, seeking a shape to attach the absence to, something to categorize.

  It found nothing it recognized.

  Only the cutout.

  Only the wrongness.

  Interesting, she thought again—this time without satisfaction.

  This time with calculation.

  She signaled to Nashira, and the strategist’s attention snapped back to her, antennae-like sensory organs shifting as if tasting the air.

  “Something is removing my forces,” Zahra’kael said, voice calm.

  Nashira’s gaze slid toward the distant town. “I feel the discontinuity, Matriarch.”

  Zahra’kael’s mouth curled slightly. “Send more.”

  Ish’kara, hearing the order relayed, tilted her head.

  She watched husks surge into the streets, watched Angarians leap and skitter along walls, watched the tide pour forward—and she felt the gap too.

  Unlike Zahra’kael, she smiled.

  If the gap was as hungry as it felt, then perhaps it could be guided.

  Perhaps it could be aimed.

  Perhaps it could be used to remove a queen who had grown too comfortable.

  She ordered the next wave forward with enthusiasm that looked like obedience.

  And she made a note—quietly, greedily—to ensure the wave was just thin enough in the places it mattered.

  —

  On the ground, Eric’s body screamed for restraint.

  He ignored it.

  His blood felt like molten wire now, buzzing through veins too narrow, pressure building behind his eyes until the world shimmered at the edges. His teeth vibrated with each mana intake. His bones felt like they were humming.

  Every breath tasted like grit.

  Every swallow tasted like metal.

  He kept moving anyway.

  He ran the switchback pattern like a man mowing a field.

  Rightward sweep—kill, kill, kill.

  Up a block—void step to clear debris, tether to swing over collapsed rubble.

  Leftward sweep—kill, kill, kill.

  He grabbed a goblin—real goblin, not husk—by the skull and dragged its face across the asphalt until its jaw disassembled into ash. He flung what remained into another cluster and deleted them both with a wide, careless arc.

  He stomped an Angarian mid-slide, heel coming down with a palms-up piledriver motion he didn’t even think about anymore. The chitin tried to resist. The mana shield flared.

  Eric overpowered it by brute force.

  Void ate the resistance.

  The creature crumpled into ash beneath his foot like a statue turning to sand.

  He didn’t aim his constructs cleanly. He didn’t narrow their hunger. Anything that got in the way—street signs, parked cars, half-collapsed walls—caught gouges and holes that would make reconstruction impossible.

  He didn’t care.

  He was making space.

  He was carving a corridor between him and the gate because he knew—deep in the part of him that remembered being Oryx—that what had stepped through was not something you fought in a crowded city.

  It was something you fought on ground you could afford to lose.

  He wiped another cluster—bodies pulled together by void cords, snapped into a knot of flesh and chitin, erased with a sweeping absence that left only a ringing in the air and a warm earthen pulse flooding back into him.

  For a moment, his aura thickened so much it looked like a tear in reality wrapped in gold.

  Eric slowed—just a fraction—long enough to look toward the gate.

  An idea struck him like lightning.

  Not spoken.

  Not fully formed.

  A moment of inspiration with teeth.

  Celeste’s earlier words floated up through the pressure in his skull.

  Eat the gate.

  He didn’t say it.

  He didn’t have time to let the thought become language.

  But the hunger inside him sharpened, and his gaze locked onto the breach like it was a throat he intended to close.

  —

  High above, Celeste stood on a rooftop that shouldn’t have supported her weight but did anyway, the wind holding her as gently as a hand.

  A goblin husk dangled from her grip, limp and twitching, its blank eyes staring at nothing. She held it over the edge as if it weighed no more than a rag.

  Below, the town was emptying.

  Not completely.

  But enough.

  A river of civilians flowed westward into the desert, guided by vehicles and brave fools and sheer panic. The racing team’s trucks moved among them like shepherds. Dust trailed behind them in long banners that made the afternoon sun look dirty.

  Celeste’s chest rose and fell. Not from exertion—she could fight all day if her seals allowed—but from tension.

  Eric’s presence had changed.

  His rage had become a weather system.

  Her instincts screamed that if she didn’t move now, she would lose the chance to pull the last fragile pieces off the board before Oryx did what Oryx did.

  She let go of the husk.

  It fell without sound, turning over once, then twice, dropping into the shattered street below. It hit with a wet crack that barely registered over distant roars.

  Celeste didn’t watch it land.

  She turned and vanished into wind.

  —

  Mike’s van lurched over broken pavement, suspension groaning. The air inside tasted like sweat and fear and hot metal.

  Michelle sat half-twisted in the passenger seat, one hand gripping the dashboard like it was the only stable thing left in the universe. Her face was pale. Her eyes were unfocused.

  She wasn’t doing well.

  Not because she was weak.

  Because she was connected.

  Hunger’s Passing didn’t give her power—it gave her proximity. It gave her glimpses. Not images, not clean thoughts, but the emotional pressure bleeding off Eric like heat.

  Grief.

  Rage.

  A hunger that was not for food, but for completion—for the world to stop being broken, for the missing pieces to be filled, for the wrongness to be erased.

  It reminded her of nights with Eric when he’d been falling apart in slow motion, and she’d loved him anyway.

  It reminded her of the longing she’d carried like a stone, the desire for a normal life that never came.

  And now that longing was mixed with something monstrous.

  She pressed her fingers against her temple and tried not to shake.

  Mike drove with both hands hard on the wheel. His knuckles were white. His jaw was clenched.

  He’d been through war before.

  His mind was trying to activate old tools—routes, cover, angles, threats.

  The difference was this time he didn’t have a rifle. He didn’t have a squad. He didn’t even have the comfort of believing his enemy could be shot if he was brave enough.

  He had a van.

  He had a friend who might be turning into a disaster.

  And he had Michelle falling apart beside him.

  “Michelle,” he said sharply, not unkind. “Hey. Hey—look at me.”

  Michelle blinked, slow. “I—I can’t—”

  “You can,” Mike said. “You have to. We’ve got people we have to find. We have to make sure everyone is out of here.”

  Michelle swallowed. Her throat worked like she was trying to force sand down. “He’s… I keep—”

  “I know,” Mike said, voice rough. “I know. But you need your head right now.”

  A crack of thunder split the air.

  Not distant.

  Here.

  A bolt of lightning struck the street between Mike and Michelle’s feet—so close it felt like it hit inside the van. Concrete exploded upward in a spray of shards. The flash turned the world white for half a heartbeat.

  Michelle screamed.

  Pain lanced her leg as a fragment cut through fabric and bit skin. Not deep—just enough to remind her she was mortal.

  Mike swore as heat kissed his shin, a shallow burn that smelled like singed hair.

  They both snapped their heads up.

  An Angarian clung to the side of a building ahead of them, limbs spread wide, lightning crawling along its carapace. Its mouth moved, muttering in a language that might as well have been spider garbage—sibilants and clicks and wet consonants that made Michelle’s skin crawl.

  Mike’s eyes flicked to the sidewalk.

  There, absurdly, leaned a shovel beside an overturned trash can, like someone had left it and run.

  Mike reached out, grabbed it, and pulled it into the van like it was Excalibur.

  He stepped out, shovel in hand, and lifted it in both hands with the grim, defiant humor of a man who knew he was outgunned and refused to bow anyway.

  “Come and fucking get some,” he growled.

  The Angarian shifted—about to leap.

  Wind slammed down like a verdict.

  Celeste appeared above it, dropping as if the sky had decided to kill spiders today. She landed on the Angarian’s back and rode it down the wall like an elevator, boots braced, expression tight.

  They hit the ground.

  Celeste stomped.

  A burst of wind amplified the force, and the Angarian’s head crushed with a wet crack that was over before Mike’s shovel could even swing. The body spasmed once, then went still, lightning fading.

  Celeste looked up at Mike and Michelle with something close to panic on her face.

  Not fear for herself.

  Fear for time.

  “We have to go now,” she said.

  Mike stared. “We’ve got people—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Celeste snapped, and the sharpness in her voice startled even her. She inhaled, forced control, but urgency still vibrated beneath her skin. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Michelle’s eyes widened. “Why? What—what are you—what are you?”

  Celeste’s gaze flicked to the van, to the unconscious form of Inaria inside. Her jaw clenched.

  “Oryx is about to do what Oryx does,” Celeste said. “It’s time to leave.”

  Michelle’s confusion broke into anger. “Enough with this Oryx—why do you keep calling Eric that?”

  Celeste looked at her like the question was both tragic and irrelevant.

  “That’s his name,” she said, voice lower now. “It’s not only his name. It’s who he is.”

  Mike tightened his grip on the shovel. “You act like this is already set in stone.”

  Celeste’s eyes didn’t soften. They didn’t harden either. They simply carried weight.

  She glanced again toward the distant gate, toward the tremors in the air, toward the feeling of a hunger that could swallow a town.

  “When the Eater of the Dawn wages war,” Celeste said quietly, “it’s all but inevitable.”

  And in the distance, the world seemed to hold its breath—waiting to see what would remain when the devourer reached the throat of the breach.