She woketo starlight and the warmth of his arm draped across her waist.
The skylight above the bed framed a rectangle of night sky—clear, bright, thick with constellations she could name in her sleep. The moon had set hours ago, leaving only stars and the faint glow of the celestial gardens in the distance.
Hux was warm against her back, his breathing slow and steady. The void marks on his chest were almost invisible—just faint lines, ghost traces of the darkness that had nearly killed him. Three more days, the healer had said, and they’d be gone entirely.
The Convergence was coming. She could feel it in the restless pulse of the ley lines, in the way the stars seemed to burn brighter each night. Soon. Not months away anymore—eight days. The signs were accelerating.
Lunaria lay still, watching the stars through the skylight, and let herself feel a practice she’d denied herself since she was twenty-two.
Hope.
The battle ahead would be harder than anything she’d ever faced.
But lying here, wrapped in the arms of a man whose fate was coming unstuck from a century of darkness, she couldn’t make herself be afraid.
THIRTY
LUNARIA
The Convergence was close.
Lunaria could feel it in the air, in the restless hum of the ley lines beneath her feet, in the way the stars seemed to press against the daylight sky even when they couldn’t be seen. The gardens knew it too—the void roses and Warning Bells signaling urgency in the dark, the orrery’s flowers tracking celestial movements with increasing restlessness. The barriers would thin soon. And when they did, the Hollow King would try to devour everything she’d come to love.
She stood in the heart of the Celestial Pavilion, surrounded by the living mechanism that Deia Tullio had spent years building.
It was beautiful. Breathtaking.
And it was a weapon.
She’d spent the past week understanding exactly what Deia had created here. The journals had spelled it out in meticulous detail once she’d cracked the celestial cipher—equations and calculations and decades of refinement, all building toward a single purpose.
The orrery wasn’t just an early warning system. It was a cannon.
A massive celestial amplifier designed to gather starlight from every corner of the sky, concentrate it through the living mechanism, and channel it into a beam powerful enough to burn a void entity out of existence. Deia had been brilliant—more brilliant than anyone had given her credit for. She’d seen the Hollow King’s return coming sixty years before anyone else, and she’d built a weapon that could stop it.
Then Cornelius Marsh had killed her.
Sixty years. Sixty years of this weapon sitting dormant, waiting for someone with the celestial magic to wake it. Sixty years of the Hollow King feeding on Holt potential while the instrument of its destruction gathered dust beneath a cracked glass dome.
Lunaria pressed her palms flat against the central console—a carved stone altar covered in astronomical symbols, worn smooth by Deia’s hands over four decades of construction. The orrery hummed beneath her touch, responsive, eager. It recognized her magic the way a dog recognized its master.
Almost ready. Almost.
But there was a problem.
The orrery needed a focus. Something to direct and concentrate the celestial energy into a usable beam instead of a diffuse explosion. Without it, firing the weapon would be like trying to start a fire with a magnifying glass that had no lens—all that power with no way to aim it.
According to Deia’s final journal entries, that focus was supposed to be a circle.
Lunaria descendedthe worn stone steps to the hidden workshop beneath the pavilion. The cellar smelled like old paperand dried flowers, the preservation wards starting to fade after six decades. Deia’s research space stretched out before her—star charts covering every surface, journals stacked in organized chaos, pressed flowers between pages that crumbled at the edges.
She’d spent hours down here over the past weeks, reconstructing the dead witch’s final plans. The ring was mentioned repeatedly in the later entries, always in the context of the weapon’s completion.
The focus ring is essential, one entry read. Without it, the orrery cannot maintain coherent direction. The celestial energy will scatter instead of concentrate. I’ve keyed the ring to my own magical signature, but any celestial witch with sufficient power should be able to attune to it.
Lunaria looked down at her hand. The ring Georgia Gentry had given her—tucked inside a box of Deia’s personal effects, pressed alongside a locket and faded trinkets, and this one essential thing—had been on her finger for weeks. She’d felt it hum the moment she first put it on, felt the way it recognized her magic. But reading Deia’s journals in this space, surrounded by the work of the woman who’d made it, she understood what that recognition meant.
She hadn’t just been wearing the ring.
