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And then, two months ago, the silence broke.

I had built a web of messengers over the years—sprites, crows, and minor demons who traded secrets for scraps of essence. They brought me whispers from the surface, fragments of news from the tribunal. But one message arrived at my cave like a scream.

A sprite, breathless and terrified, fell onto the stone floor of my sanctuary. “They know,” it gasped, clutching at my boots. “The watchers. They found the Cornwall gate. Burned it. They are raiding the tunnels. They are snuffing out the pockets.”

I stood still, the knife in my hand hovering over the apple I had been peeling.

The tribunal. After fifty years, they had finally found the trail. And they weren’t just hunting me anymore. They were burning the warrens to flush out the rats.

“How many?” I asked, my voice rusty.

“Groups of ten or more,” the sprite wept. “They are coming with fire. With edicts. They know you are the source.”

I looked around my cave, at the meager possessions I had gathered—a few books, a blanket, and the weapons I kept sharp and ready. It was not a home. This holding cell I had built for myself. And I was tired. So exhausted of the damp, of the dark, and of the endless gnawing hunger of the void. Of being the monster in everyone else’s story.

“Let them come,” I hissed.

I packed nothing. There was nothing to take. I sent the sprite away with a payment of essence and walked to the cave’s mouth. The decision not to run settled over me with the weight of a stone. I was done running. I was done hiding. If Malakar wanted me, he could have me. But I would not be dragged out of a hole in the ground like a badger. I would meet them.

But first, I had to leave something behind—a gift from me for the unseelie. I could not pass without something to be remembered by. At least by someone. I could not let all my hard work of fifty-plus years be undone.

I did not just reach for the veil but stepped through it. I slipped out of my physical skin and let the void carry me upward, phasing through layers of reality until the damp cave dissolved into the crushing colorless silence of Limbo.

I stood at the edge of the Hall of the Forgotten. It was not merely a plane but a structure of impossible geometry, a cathedral built of gray mist and silence. Where the ceiling was lost in the gloom, and the floor was a river of drifting, aimless souls. They flowed in a slow, mournful current, millions washing toward a judgment that might never come.

I moved against the current and kept low, pressing myself into the realm’s architectural shadows, a smudge of darkness against the gray.

Far ahead, the keepers walked. They were towering figures, their robes woven from the fabric of dusk and their heads bowed as they cataloged the drift. I saw the glint of hourglass eyes scanning the procession.

If they saw me, there would be no trial. I was not supposed to be here. Even without my light, I was a foreign object, a piece of grit in the celestial eye. I was an intruder in the space between life and death.

As a keeper drifted past, I held my breath, though I had no lungs here, and flattened myself against a pillar of solidified ash. The hem of its robe brushed the space where I had stood, the sound like dry leaves on stones. It paused. The sand in its eyes shifted, a sudden frantic swirl. It must’ve sensed a disturbance, a displacement of air that shouldn’t exist.

I became nothing. I let the void consume my outline, willing myself into nonexistence.

The keeper lingered, its faceless cowl turning left and right. After an eternity that lasted only a few seconds, it moved on, joining the procession of the dead.

I exhaled a ghost of a breath and darted toward the farthest darkest corner of the hall. Here, the current of souls slowed to a stagnant swirl, spinning in confused circles against the boundary of the realm. It was a dead end, a waste.

Perfect.

I knelt at the very edge of the boundary wall and pressed the tip of my finger against the fabric of the dimension, focusing the absolute hunger of the void into a single microscopic point. I pushed.

It punctured—a perfect tiny hole no larger than a coin.

A soft whistling draft began. The vacuum of the hungry unseelie realm below catches the air of Limbo and creates a subtle, irresistible suction. It was gentle, almost imperceptible. A drifting soul, a wisp of pale gray, floated too close, caught the draft, and spiraled faster and faster until—zip—it vanished down the drain, pulled straight into the waiting courts below.

I smiled. It wasn’t a breach the tribunal would notice. It was a leak. A self-sustaining siphon that would feed my monsters one lost soul at a time. Forever. A masterpiece of metaphysical engineering.

I slipped back through the shadows before the next patrol could round the pillar, leaving the draft to do its work.

And then I would go to the person I had terribly missed with my last goodbye: Sera.

I knew where she was. I had always known. The love of a sister was not something that could be severed by magic or distance. I knew she was in Savannah, and my informants would bring me her life updates.

I had stayed away to protect her, to keep my darkness from bleeding into her life. But now, at the end of things, I needed to see her. I needed to know she had lived the life I couldn’t. I needed to see that one of us had made it out.

So, I traveled to America, slipped through a gate in a New Orleans crypt, and made my way north. The world was loud and bright and smelled of gasoline and sugar. I moved through it like a ghost until I stood on a street in Savannah.