The village of Towler slept under a sky that had never once betrayed it. Drovil lay on his side in the dark of the farmhouse, one arm flung across the empty half of the bed that still smelled faintly of her after all these years. Artemis was a warm white weight against his legs, breathing slow. Outside, the wheat whispered. Crickets. The distant groan of the old well-winch in the wind. Ordinary night in Allora. Then reality tore. It did not open so much as rip—a vertical wound the height of the world, edges screaming with colors that had no names. Raw magic vomited through it in a tide of light and pressure and wrongness. It hit Towler like a wave of living glass. Thatched roofs burst into violet fire and were gone. People in their beds did not even have time to sit up. Flesh, wood, stone, livestock—everything that was not Drovil and the wolf—unmade itself in a single, soundless instant. Bodies became ash that never had time to fall. The tide found them. It poured into Drovil’s chest like molten starlight. Into Artemis’s ribs. Into bone and blood and the spaces between thoughts. There was no room left for breath. Pain was too small a word. Their bodies arched off the floorboards, every muscle locked, every nerve screaming as the magic took. It did not ask. It rewrote. Drovil’s mouth opened in a silent howl. Artemis’s jaws snapped at nothing. They flailed like drowning things, limbs striking the walls, the bedframe, each other. Seconds or hours—there was no difference. Only the invasion. Only the feeling of something vast and hungry sewing itself into the meat of them. Then it stopped. Drovil woke on the floor. The first thing he heard was not the ruin of the world. It was a voice. Soft. Female. Frantic. Inside his skull. “Wake up! DAD!” He jerked upright so hard his vision swam. He had no children. He had never had children. The word landed like a blade between the ribs. Artemis stood over him. She was still white. Still fluffy. But she filled the room. Five feet at the shoulder on all fours, a mountain of fur and muscle that had not existed minutes ago. A sheen of blue and gold moved across her coat like heat-haze, an aura that refused to stay still. Her eyes were no longer amber. They were open wounds of light. Lightning lived in them. When she opened her mouth, no bark came. The voice came again, raw with terror. “DAD. OUTSIDE.” Drovil’s jaw hung loose. He stared at the wolf who had slept on his feet for years. Over her massive head the window showed him hell. The fields were gone. In their place: a writhing dark. Things poured from the unseen wound in the sky—Terrocytes, though he did not yet know the name. Tentacles and shadow given hunger. Some two feet tall, scuttling. Some six. Some thirty, dragging themselves on limbs that should not bend that way. And beyond them, blotting out half the night, a shape two hundred feet high. Hundreds of tentacles kept it aloft, a writhing cathedral of flesh and void that was still arriving, still spilling through the portal like a god being born wrong. A sound rose. Not one throat. Thousands. A screech that was every monster speaking at once, a needle driven through both ears. Drovil clapped his hands over his head and still felt it in his teeth. Artemis whimpered, shook her great head, sparks leaping from her glowing eyes. He lurched to his feet on legs that no longer felt entirely his. The great sword leaned where it always had, by the door—the same blade he had carried as a boy in the legion and never quite put away. He snatched it up. It weighed nothing. Feather-light. As if the steel itself had been rewritten along with his bones. He stared at the window, at the titan still unfolding itself from the tear. “A… Artemis…” The wolf’s voice exploded in his mind, panic stripping it raw. “We have to run, Dad!”