Prologue

  The signal came at night.

  It wasn’t an explosion, nor a tremor, nor anything loud enough to wake the world. It was quieter than that—more insidious. A pulse through the air, a ripple in the fabric of things. Those who were attuo such disturbances felt it not in their ears but in their bones, an impossible hum threading itself through the marrow.

  In the observatories, the instruments flickered. At military instaltions, sensors fred with untraceable interference. Satellites caught glimpses of anomalies they couldn’t expin—brief distortions in the earth’s magic field, gone as quickly as they appeared.

  But in the deep pces of the world, where a stone and fotten things slept beh yers of time, the response was different.

  Something stirred.

  In an isoted research outpost, a man woke gasping. His skin was damp, his breath sharp, and though the room was warm, his body shivered.

  Not from cold.

  From something else.

  He sat up, staring into the dark, his pulse hammering against his ribs. At first, he thought it was a dream—the kind that gs to the edge of wakefulness, refusing to fade. But the sensation didn’t pass. It was as though something had reached out and touched him, not physically, but from a pce beyond touch, beyond sight.

  He wasn’t alone.

  The thought came unbidden, slipping into his mind like a whisper that wasn’t his. He turned, sing the dim-lit room, his instincts caught between logid something deeper, something older.

  Then he heard it.

  Not a souly. Not in the eople hear their owhing or the rustle of wind through leaves. This was different—an absence, a wrongness, a hollow space where silence should have been.

  The signal.

  It wasn’t the first time he had studied it. For years, reports had trickled in—localized disturbances, strange fluctuations. The Hollow Signal, they called it. A myth among analysts. An anomaly with no souro pattern, no expnation.

  Until now.

  Because tonight, for the first time, the signal didn’t simply appear.

  It grew stronger.

  And somewhere, beyond the reach of human eyes, in temples long abandoned, beh ruins where stone guardians stood watch over things buried deep—something old awakened.

  Waiting.

  Watg.

  Listening.