I knew how this book ended before I knew how it began.

That happens sometimes. A character walks into your head fully formed and walking toward something, and you spend three books finding out what. Callum Vane arrived that way. I met him in The Hollow Clock with the lamps already burning and his hands already dirty, and I think some part of me knew even then where the road went. I just didn't want to look at it too closely.

Now I have. The Hollow City is out on July 29, and it is the end of his story.

I want to be honest about what that did to me, because I think readers can tell when a writer is protecting himself.

There is a particular dishonesty in finales. The temptation is to give everyone what they want. Tie the threads. Pay off the promises. Let the people who survived stand in the light at the end and call it earned. And some of that is right, some of that is what a story owes you. But a finale that only gives is a lie. The reason an ending lands is that it costs something. You cannot have the weight without the loss. I knew that going in, and I still spent weeks circling the last act like a man who keeps walking past a door he has to open eventually.

The strange thing nobody warns you about is the grief. Not the reader's grief. Mine.

I have lived inside Callum's head for the better part of a year. I know how he takes his silences. I know what he does with his hands when he is afraid and trying not to show it. I know the exact shape of the thing he wants and cannot say, because I built that shape, one scene at a time, and then I had to take it somewhere final. Writing the last chapters felt less like finishing a book and more like saying goodbye to someone I had been quietly arguing with for months. When it was done I sat for a while and did not feel triumphant. I felt the way you feel after a long visit with someone you love, driving home in the dark, already missing them.

And here is the part that surprised me most. The relief came too, right alongside the grief, and the two did not cancel out. They sat together. I was sorry it was over and glad I had not flinched. You can hold both. I think the best endings ask you to.

If you have been with me since the first book, you already know the things I cannot say here without spoiling what I worked hardest to protect. You know what the lamps cost. You know who Callum is when no one is feeding them. So I will only say this. I did not look away at the end. I owed him that, and I owed you that, and the promise I make on every book I write still holds, even here, even in Hollowmere where so little is gentle. The love does not change. The world does, and it takes what it takes, but the love is the thing left standing.

That is the whole reason I write what I write. Every genre, every town, every series. The world changes. The love doesn't.

The Hollow City releases July 29. If you want a copy before then, I am giving away one hundred of them on Goodreads through July 15, and the First Light Club gets first light, as they always do.

Come and say goodbye to him with me.

Yours, Elias