Through the Last Gate: The Breath Returns

The new world was supposed to be quiet. They were wrong.

Ten years after humanity fled through the Last Gate, the survivors on Auralis believed they had built a future. They had only been granted a pause.

Beneath the shimmering plains, the planet has been listening. Every footstep. Every buried grief. Every child born under alien suns. Now Auralis remembers — and she is waking.

Children speak with voices older than language. Shadows walk without bodies. Machines that were never built rise from tunnels no map has ever shown.

And when the sky tears open above the settlement, a dead world — hollowed, blackened, and impossibly ancient — drifts silently toward them.

Mara Ellison once opened the Gate to save mankind. Now her own son and daughter have become the planet’s voice… and something on the other side of the stars has finally heard the call.

The Breath Returns is the chilling second book in the Through the Last Gate series. A complete story that stands alone — yet leaves the door open for what comes next.

For readers of Annihilation, Arrival, and Jeff VanderMeer comes a science-fiction horror series where the planet itself is alive… and it has not forgiven.