The Sixth Lock (Hali Files)

The war ended generations ago. Something has started checking the old roads.

When reports reach the city of a strange figure haunting the western countryside, former demon hunter Kael is offered a bounty the Church would rather keep quiet.

The sightings make little sense. Ancient boundary stones have been disturbed. Animals refuse familiar roads. The smell of burning incense lingers where no prayers have been spoken. And the stranger watches rather than kills, studying village bells, gathering places and forgotten defences as though measuring how much the world still remembers.

Kael knows the behaviour.

It belongs to an outrider.

A demon that comes ahead of war.

Beside him, Maris struggles with magic that increasingly reacts before she understands it. Her power can expose what lies beneath old protections, but every new working risks revealing something about herself she is not ready to face. Kael's own Hali Sickness is answering the disturbance as well, drawing him back towards the hunter he has spent years trying to leave behind.

Their investigation leads beyond one isolated bounty and towards a truth buried beneath the Church's version of history: an enemy from the old war still lies imprisoned beneath the city, held behind six ancient locks.

The six locks still hold.

Something else has crossed.

The Sixth Lock is Book Three of The Hali Files, a dark fantasy horror series of demon hunters, unstable magic, occult mystery, body horror, buried sacred ruins and a world discovering that its oldest war may never truly have ended.