The thing that came through the breach wasn't like the demon or the spawn or anything I'd seen before—it was absence, pure void given shape, a hole in reality that consumed light and sound and anything stupid enough to get close.
A probe. The Root testing our defenses by sending a fragment of itself.
And it was eating through our eastern perimeter like tissue paper.
"Fall back!" Kael's Alpha command cut across the chaos even though he was still recovering from yesterday's training disaster. "Establish defensive positions! Do not engage directly!"
Do not engage directly because touching the void-creature meant getting consumed, and we'd already lost three fighters who'd tried.
Three more casualties. The count kept climbing.
I reached for the temporal magic because that was what the Fae had spent three days beating into me—use the power, don't think about the cost, just use it—and focused on the probe.
Freeze.
