AEON: THE HUNGER
Book Two of AEON
The dead do not stay where you buried them. And to keep the one you love, you must refuse the ones you lost.
Five months ago, Eli Vale gave away the power of a god to become a man worth keeping. He kept his wife, Mara, with her cold feet and her warm hands. He kept his grief for the friend he could not save. He kept the whole memory of having been the mind that authored all of history -- and none of the power. He did not keep the one thing that would have made him safe.
Now the cold is back. It cannot get into his sealed world the way it came, so it has found the one door a sealed man can never close: grief. And it has learned to wear the dead. It comes to the bereaved of a rain-grey city wearing the faces they loved -- carrying their true and private memories, speaking in their exact voices -- and it asks only to be let in. The ones who answer are found with their hearts whole and no reason left inside them to have stopped.
It wears his best friend. It is coming for his wife. And the failsafe that once stood guard at the door is gone, leaving only the man who built it -- mortal now, powerless, grieving -- and the terrible discipline he has to learn and then teach a whole city before winter is out: how to refuse the face you would give anything to see, without ever stopping loving it.
Because the thing at the door is not a monster. It is everything he cut away to exist -- the drafts he did not keep, the worlds he made and unmade, come home at last, and starving. It does not want to destroy him. It only wants what he wanted. It wants to be kept. And it has all winter to knock.
A relentless, grief-struck survival-horror thriller about memory, mortality, and what the kept owe the ones who were thrown away -- AEON: The Hunger is Book Two of AEON, the sequel to Incarnate.
Some doors you can only close from the outside. Pray someone loves you enough to be there when you cannot.
