1 The Awakening

The beach house on the headland above Crescent Cove

had big windows and the kind of quiet that made people

honest.

Gabe Mitchell stood barefoot by the glass with a mug

of coffee that had given up on being hot. The Pacific

pressed a slow shine across the morning. Gulls angled

down towards safer thermals. The horizon wore a thin

bruise.

He wasn’t watching the water.

He was watching the mantel.

Beyond the glass, a narrow track wound down the

headland through salt-stunted scrub. The deck boards

had silvered in the weather; sand collected in the joins

no matter how often they swept. Brooke had left a pair of

shoes beside the door. His own were under the chair,

one on its side. Ordinary things. He had become fond of

finding them there.

The house had taken time to feel like a home instead

of somewhere to wait for the next disaster. They had

stopped putting every noise down to the sea. Sometimes

a loose window was only a loose window.

This morning, he wished that was all it was.

Four idols sat in a neat, uneasy row.

They had carried them out of the drowned temple

after the last time the sea learned a bad trick—after

Gallus’s rampage through Crescent Cove—when Brooke

had hurled a salt-and-steel charge onto the altar during

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the solar eclipse, snapping a half-made gate shut and

breaking a spell Gallus had built with wrecks and tide.

The ring of wrecked ships at the reef—the Prognosis, the

Zodiac, the Golden Goose, the Siren, and the Tua

Cross—had formed a pentagram while the ocean

screamed and forgot.

The idols stood in a row.

They were not trophies when Gabe and Brooke took

them home.

They were locks.

On the stone mantel sat four statues:

Gallus—green-black, wolf-headed, with a hooked

beak, bat-like wings, and tentacles coiled around its feet.

A thin scorched seam still burned along its base.

Abnegazar—pale stone veined with dull gold,

crowned and angular, eldest in the way mountains are.

Rathos—kiln-red and hairline-cracked, warped like

clay that remembered fire.

Ghast—bone-smooth, hollow-eyed, a scream made

permanent.

Under their strange colours, each figure was brass.

They had changed since the temple. Neither Gabe nor

Brooke found that comforting.

Between Abnegazar and Gallus sat a curl of golden

coral—no story, no pedigree. Just a pretty reef relic that

caught the light and gave it back without promise.

Brooke padded in, her hair tied up, a folder she didn’t

need tucked under one arm. She stopped when she saw

his face.

“They moved?”

Gabe nodded towards Abnegazar.

“Not much. A degree. Enough to notice once you

decide to see.”

“Maybe you bumped the mantel,” Brooke said,

already unconvinced by her own attempt at reassurance.

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“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, there’s got to be some explanation.”

“Or maybe,” Gabe said as he looked at the Gallus idol,

“there isn’t.”

The Gallus idol began to tremble and move on its

own, as though it were trying to walk.

The house began to shake.

A tremor ran quietly through the pilings—not a

quake’s rattle, but a pressure that had learned manners.

Picture frames along the hall bounced on their nails. On

the lounge-room cupboard, Nick and Rachel’s wedding

photo shivered across the wood, tilted, and settled

again—no longer facing the room, but angled towards

the mantel. The glass caught a thin line of light before

becoming still.

Outside, the ocean convulsed.

Far offshore, the surface rose in a clean, slick circle

and flashed.

Brooke hurried to the deck rail.

“Gabe—”

He was already beside her.

The cove looked calm until it didn’t.

A dark shape rose and cut south, driving water before

it like a plough. It breached once—limbs coiling, spray

hurling sunlight, triffid-like maws flexing at the ends of

tentacles—then vanished into the deeper blue on a

course pointed straight towards the city.

“Gallus,” Brooke breathed.

“He’s not hunting us,” Gabe said, his voice gone flat.

“He’s heading south.”

Inside, the idols hummed.

Gallus’s fracture glowed, a low ember reopening.

Abnegazar’s gold veins warmed like old coals. Rathos

fogged the air with kiln heat. A thin, bone-white halo

thickened around Ghast.

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The golden coral quivered. Tiny branches chimed

against stone with a barely audible tick... tick... then

flared once—an aureate breath—and went still.

Brooke snatched the newspaper off the table.

The first reports had been coming out of Sydney for

two days. Scattered attacks. Missing people. Enough to

worry them, not enough to explain what was coming.

The front page was grainy with rain and siren

light—Sydney in flames. George Street littered with

broken glass; a wolf-like creature crouched atop a taxi,

its muzzle wet, its eyes burning. Two more blurred

shapes lurked in the frame if you let your mind stop

translating monsters into shadows.

The caption tried—and failed—to domesticate it.

ANIMAL ATTACKS DURING HISTORIC STORM 

POLICE URGE CALM.

She didn’t say their names.

They didn’t have anything to say.

Just a city full of strangers already running out of

time.

Gabe folded the paper once and set it down like

evidence.

“Pack. Two changes of clothes. Med kit. Batteries.

Burners. We take the idols south.”

Brooke met his eyes.

“We’re going to follow him.”

“This time we’re ending him,” Gabe said.

They moved like people who had practised not

panicking.

Brooke pulled a straight salt line across the mantel—a

last, stubborn habit—and looped consecrated cord twice

around her wrist. Iron nails slid into an inside pocket.

Gabe opened the safe, checked the pistols with guilty

tenderness, counted silver-core magazines by touch. The

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short shotgun went into the holdall with matching

shells.

The idols fought them the way locks resist being

lifted.

Gallus dragged seaward even through plastic. Ghast

thinned the air until breathing became difficult.

Abnegazar added weight where none should exist.

Rathos fogged the lids with heat.

The golden coral rattled as Gabe’s sleeve brushed it. It

rolled a few inches before stopping with a soft metallic

sigh—a harmless sea curio in a room that had run out of

harmless things.

Latches bit.

Straps cinched.

Another tremor struck the house.

The long mirror over the sideboard rippled once—its

reflection half a heartbeat late—before becoming still.

On the cupboard, Nick and Rachel kept smiling, their

frame angled just a fraction further towards the mantel,

as though memory itself wanted a better view of the

coming war.

They muscled the boxes into the ute.

Brooke went back for the med kit. Gabe watched her

check the lock, then check it again.

“Got everything?” he asked.

“Everything we can carry.”

He took the kit from her, making room beside the

weapons. She caught his wrist before he could turn

away.

“If there are people there who can help, we let them.”

“Of course.”

“I mean it, Gabe. We can’t do all of it ourselves.”

He wanted to tell her that he knew. Instead, he looked

at the four boxes taking up half the tray and nodded. She

knew what he was like. That was one of the problems

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with marrying someone who had seen you at your worst.

You couldn’t get away with much.

On the ridge road, Gabe stole one last look at the reef.

The slick circle beyond it convulsed and collapsed.

Phosphorescence pulsed where the temple slept—a

gate beating like a heart.

Far along the blue line to the south, something vast

cut through the sea towards Sydney.

The newspaper lay open on the dashboard, frozen on

that terrible image of the city’s worst night: werewolves

on taxis, smoke over Circular Quay, people fleeing

through the streets.

Brooke buckled in.

“If a portal opened once, it’ll open again.”

“Then we hit him before it opens. We can’t afford to

find out what he was trying to release before,” Gabe said,

starting the engine. “We can’t wait for help. We don’t

have any.”

He put his foot down.

The Ford Ranger ute leapt into the gathering weather,

four boxed idols humming wrong heartbeats in the

tray—out of time with each other, perfectly in time with

what was coming.

The headland fell behind.

The sea kept its secrets.

The road unspooled south towards sirens.

On the mantel, the golden coral caught one last

thread of sunlight and offered it back to the room before

finally going quiet.

Far beyond the headlands, the city took a breath it

would not get to finish.