The hand of absence never landed.

It stopped three hand-spans above Zelda’s upturned face, trembling, as though the quiet itself had been seized by the throat.

The impossible eye on the other side of the newborn door had blinked.

That single motion sent a pressure wave through the throne room that had nothing to do with air. The towering silhouette of quiet-Delilah staggered. Frost patterns across the walls fractured. The absorbed second pack—still visible as denser currents of memory inside the entity’s form—writhed like living things that had suddenly remembered they were once mercies and not weapons.

Kael dragged Zelda and the pup backward under the partial cover of the...