Deia’s ring burned on her finger. Ready. Waiting.
And at the edge of reality, where the barrier between worlds had grown thin as paper, something vast and hungry began to push through.
The Hollow King.
She’d tried to prepare herself for what it would look like. Aero’s descriptions. The Memory Moss recordings. Thefragments of knowledge scattered through Deia’s journals. None of it had been adequate.
The Hollow King wasn’t a creature. It was an absence. A void in the shape of hunger, darker than darkness, consuming light and warmth and color wherever it touched. Looking at it directly made her soul recoil—that existential vertigo Aero had warned about, the sense of being so small, so temporary, so utterly meaningless against something that had existed before stars learned to burn.
The fragment of Cornelius had been a shadow of a shadow. This was the source. This was what had been feeding on the Holts, stealing futures before they could form, hollowing out an entire bloodline because one man had traded lives that weren’t his to give.
Come,the Hollow King whispered, and the voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, patient and ancient and absolutely certain.All things end. I simply harvest the endings before they occur. Why fight what you cannot stop?
“Because we’re Haven Shores.” Lunaria’s voice rang clear across the gardens, loud enough to be heard over the screaming of void creatures beginning to pour through the tear in reality. “And we don’t know when to quit.”
Haven Shores answered.
Theo’s wolves struck first.
The pack surged from the tree line in a coordinated wave—gray fur and gleaming fangs, moving with the synchronized precision of creatures who shared something deeper than instinct. Their pack bonds blazed against the darkness, visible toLunaria’s celestial sight as golden threads linking them to each other and to their alpha.
They hit the void creatures like a breaking tide. The lesser entities—things that existed between moments, that slipped through shadows—dissolved under the wolves’ assault. Not truly alive to begin with, they had no answer for the ferocity of a pack defending its territory.
Theo led from the front, his massive gray form tearing through the enemy with brutal efficiency.
But more void creatures poured through the tear. And more. And more.
Leo’s lions hit them from the flank.
The pride had none of the wolves’ synchronized grace—they were all individual power, all savage independence channeled into a common purpose. Leo’s roar shook the ground, and the void creatures actually hesitated, some ancient survival instinct recognizing an apex predator even without physical form.
Lunaria spotted a familiar tawny shape among the pride. Junie sat astride one of the smaller lionesses, lobbing chaos potions into the void creatures’ midst with maniacal glee.
“Take that, you reality-eating nightmare fuel!” Another potion arced through the air, and where it landed, three void creatures simply... unraveled, their non-existence disrupted by Junie’s particular brand of mayhem.
Cal’s bears arrived from the north, and the ground actually shook.
The couple had flown in from Paris, and they’d spent the intervening time eating everything in Dahlia’s new bakery and napping. Now that stored energy translated into raw, devastating power. Bears weren’t subtle. Bears weren’t strategic. Bears were simply, overwhelmingly, unstoppably present.
Cal’s roar made Leo’s sound like a kitten’s mew. He crashed into the thickest concentration of void creatures and startedswinging, each blow powerful enough to make the air crack. Dahlia stood at his back, her nurturing magic twisted into something defensive—barriers and shields and healing energy pouring into the wounded.
Impressive,the Hollow King observed, its presence pressing heavier against the barrier.But insufficient. These creatures are merely the overflow of my hunger. When I cross fully, your bonded pairs will feed me for centuries.
“Yeah, about that.” Lunaria’s hands tightened on the orrery’s controls. “I have a different plan.”
The dragons descendedfrom the sky like falling stars.
Aero came first—eight centuries of accumulated power wrapped in storm-gray scales, lightning crackling along every ridge and spine. His roar wasn’t sound; it was thunder given voice, and the void creatures closest to his descent simply ceased to exist, overwhelmed by the electrical discharge.
Delos followed, burning.
Fire dragon, not nearly as old, but what he lacked in experience he made up for in sheer pyrotechnic enthusiasm. Flames poured from his jaws in continuous streams, and where the fire touched void creatures, they screamed—actually screamed, a sound that existed below hearing but scraped against every nerve.
“Is that all you’ve got?” Delos bellowed, banking hard to strafe another cluster of enemies. “I’ve had dates more terrifying than this!”
Given what Lunaria had heard about his dating history, that was saying something.
The dragons bought her time. Bought the witches time. In the gardens below, Cassia raised her arms to the sky, and the Convergence-churned atmosphere responded.
