The Beacon Year - Matthew Petchinsky

One year ago, a signal was sent from the basement of the Briar Hollow Museum of the Unseen.

Now something has answered.

As the anniversary of that signal approaches, strange disturbances begin spreading across Briar Hollow, Texas. Small gravity shifts lift loose stones from the ground. Shadows move in directions the sun cannot explain. Predators gather along the tree line as if answering a call no human can hear. Rowan, Maeve, Clay, and Evelyn know the pattern-because they started it.

When dusk arrives, the pulse returns stronger than ever. Streets warp, the air thickens, and the sky above Briar Hollow fractures into an impossible antler-shaped constellation. What once haunted a house now claims the entire town. The Thorned Witness has risen beyond the museum walls, and its presence bends gravity, flesh, and thought itself.

As townspeople begin to fall under the influence of the Harvester-an intelligence that can inhabit human bodies to expand the spreading fractures-Rowan makes a choice that could condemn them all. Standing beneath a sky that no longer belongs to Earth, he refuses the Witness's territorial claim aloud.

But some things do not accept refusal.

And Briar Hollow may already belong to it.