Before the first grief, she made the mountains.

The Cailleach Bheur has no enemy. She has only the work: boulder, basin, loch, winter. The Highlands are her architecture. The Corryvreckan is her laundry. She does not bargain. She does not threaten. She simply continues ? and where she continues, the land has no choice but to become what she makes it.

Nessa Dowd has closed two wrongs. Corryvreckan is behind her. The team is marked but alive. And now something moves in the Highlands that predates every name they have learned to fear ? something that has survived by being mistaken for weather.

The pages arriving from Scottish archives are blank. Not empty. Blank. There is a difference, and Nessa can hear it.