Last Light
Space Horror — 9 Books
Nine books. One little girl. And the most terrifying question in science fiction: what does it cost to save everyone?
The Last Light series begins with a salvage team sent into a sphere of absolute darkness — a place where an entire solar system has been swallowed and nothing comes back out. No light escapes. No signals penetrate. Everyone sent inside has vanished. It starts as claustrophobic sci-fi horror, the kind that has you checking that your doors are locked at 2 AM. And then Kate Morrison shows up. Eight years old. The only survivor on a moon base full of dead soldiers. Not afraid of the right things.
That's the engine of this series. Kate grows up across nine books — from a traumatized eight-year-old to something I'm honestly not sure has a name. She's not a chosen one. She doesn't have special powers dropped in her lap. She has a connection to something ancient and alien and utterly indifferent to human life, and she has to figure out what to do with that before it unmakes her entirely. Watching her navigate that — growing from scared kid to reluctant weapon to something that transcends both — is the reason I wrote nine books instead of stopping at three.
The thing is, this series was never just about the horror. The horror is the delivery mechanism. What it's really about is sacrifice, and what sacrifice means when the person making it is twelve years old and didn't sign up for any of this. If you want science fiction with genuine emotional stakes — the kind that stays with you — this is the series for you.
The Books
Book 1: Last Light in the Dark
Marcus and his salvage team thought they drew the worst assignment: investigating the Veil, a sphere of absolute darkness that has swallowed an entire solar system. What they find on Moon Base X-95-A is worse than silence. A radio operator claiming everything is "hunky dory" despite the base being abandoned for weeks. Fresh scratches in the vents where someone was dragged into the dark. And in the crystalline alien city two kilometers underground, something ancient has been waiting a very long time.
Oh, and a two-hundred-year-old supersoldier who has been hunting in those tunnels ever since.
Get Last Light in the Dark on Amazon →
Book 2: Echoes in the Void
Three months ago, Team 2 vanished on planet Echo-Seven. Now their beacon has reactivated.
Chelsea Park thought she understood horror after surviving New Haven. She was wrong. The planet is sterile — no wind, no decay, no life. But an ancient organism has lived beneath its settlements for twenty thousand years, absorbing every consciousness it encounters. Millions of minds locked in its song, offered immortality at the cost of everything that makes you human. And Kate Morrison, the ten-year-old sole survivor of Team 2, can hear it calling.
Get Echoes in the Void on Amazon →
Book 3: Fading Darkness
One corrupted ship destroyed. Eleven remain. And Kate carries the darkness now.
The entity has a name. A history. Plans for humanity that span millennia. As dimensional rifts multiply across colonized space, Kate Morrison becomes the key to stopping — or accelerating — the apocalypse. She's twelve years old, she's been marked by cosmic horror, and she may be the only one who can communicate with something that doesn't think in human terms. To save humanity, she must understand it. To understand it, she must let it in.
Get Fading Darkness on Amazon →
Book 4: Spreading Shadows
Kate Morrison can sense the corrupted ships before they arrive — making her humanity's only early warning system against an approaching fleet. But every time she uses that gift, the darkness grows stronger inside her. An impossible choice for a girl who should be in grade school, not standing between civilization and extinction.
Coming soon to Amazon.
Book 5: Whispered Dark
The voice never stops.
Two years after her connection to the Hollowing awakened, nine-year-old Kate Morrison has become humanity's most valuable asset — a living early warning system that senses dimensional incursions before they happen. But the connection that saves billions is slowly killing her. The Hollowing whispers in the dark. It learns her fears. It promises relief from the exhaustion that never ends. Every day, saying no gets a little harder.
Coming soon to Amazon.
Book 6: The Widening Veil
The dimensional seal is failing. The Dominion fleet is massing. Ten-year-old Kate Morrison has eighteen months before the entity merging with her mind erases everything she is. Every time she uses her powers, she buys humanity time — and loses more of herself. The mathematics of survival demand her sacrifice. But Chelsea Park made a promise to a dying man: she won't let them use Kate up.
Three thousand enemy ships wait beyond the thinning veil. One scientist thinks Kate's desperate fight to stay human might be the key to a new kind of barrier — a door that can choose when to open.
Coming soon to Amazon.
Book 7: Between Darkness
The invasion has begun. Seven hundred Dominion warships pour through the warp routes, overwhelming humanity's defenses. Eleven-year-old Kate Morrison — the only weapon that can turn the tide — is running out of time. The Hollowing corruption is at seventy-eight percent now, reshaping her into something neither human nor monster.
When a desperate strike mission fails — twelve soldiers dead — Kate faces the choice she's been dreading. The only way to stop the Hollowing is to join the dimensional seal herself. One chance in four to survive. She's been making impossible choices since she was seven. This will be her last.
Coming soon to Amazon.
Book 8: The Breaking Light
The final battle has arrived. The last hope is a child.
Kate Morrison is twelve years old. She carries the Hollowing's corruption in her blood, hears its whispers in her dreams, and knows exactly what it will cost to stop it. To save everyone she loves, she must stop fighting the corruption inside her. Embrace it. Become it. Transform into something that can hold back the darkness forever.
The door that walks must choose to close.
Coming soon to Amazon.
Book 9: Last Light Rising
Seventeen months have passed since Kate Morrison sealed herself within the dimensional barrier, sacrificing her freedom to save humanity. The galaxy mourns a legend.
Then scientist Nigel Rhodes detects an impossible signal from inside the seal. Kate is alive. Trapped in eternal darkness — but alive. Now Chelsea Park and the remnants of DDI face the impossible choice: risk reopening the very wound Kate died to close, or leave the girl who saved them all to face eternity alone.
Coming soon to Amazon.
Meet the Characters
Kate Morrison
The heart of the series. Kate starts as an eight-year-old sole survivor of a moon base massacre and grows into something the universe wasn't prepared for. Her connection to the Hollowing — the dimensional entity that wants to absorb all consciousness — makes her both invaluable and endangered. She is brave and terrified in equal measure, and every choice she makes costs her something real.
Marcus Reeves
The salvage team leader who starts it all. Marcus has survived on competence and stubbornness for so long he'd almost forgotten how to be afraid. Moon Base X-95-A reminds him. He's not a hero by design — he's a professional who keeps finding himself in situations that demand heroism anyway.
Rylee Voss
Admiral of the fleet. The person tasked with defending humanity against an enemy that can't be shot, bombed, or outmaneuvered — only reasoned with through a twelve-year-old girl. Rylee is pragmatic to the bone, which makes her relationship with Kate one of the most complicated in the series.
Alexis Chen
Scientist and reluctant expert on the Hollowing. Alexis started trying to understand the corruption because it was a fascinating problem. She stayed because the answer kept getting worse. Her work threads through the entire series as humanity's fragile attempt to meet incomprehensible intelligence with something other than weapons.
The Fist of the First Citizen
Two hundred years old. An augmented supersoldier who survived inside the Veil long after every mission parameter ceased to exist. The Fist isn't evil — he's broken in a way that makes evil look simple. He's what happens when purpose outlasts everything that gave it meaning.
What This Series Is Really About
The Last Light series is built around questions that kept haunting me while writing it. What does sacrifice mean when the person making it is twelve years old and didn't volunteer? What is heroism when there's no good option, only less-terrible ones? What do you lose when childhood is stolen not through cruelty, but through necessity?
Kate never chose to be at the center of this. She survived when she should have died, and then the universe kept handing her bigger problems. The cost of heroism runs through every book — not just Kate's, but Marcus's, Chelsea's, Rylee's. Every character who gets close to this fight pays for it. The question the series keeps asking is whether what they're protecting is worth the price.
The thing I'm proudest of here is the thread about understanding your enemy. The Hollowing isn't evil. It wants to consume all consciousness — but it does this because it genuinely doesn't understand why that's wrong. Kate has to figure out how to communicate with something that doesn't think the way humans do. And eventually, she has to teach it something that should be unteachable: how to die.
Light in darkness. Teaching death to immortality. That's not just thematic shorthand — that's the literal arc of the whole series.
Fans of Alien, Annihilation, and The Expanse will feel right at home here.
Last Light is part of Lincoln Cole's connected fiction universe — a shelf of series that share characters and lore.
Lincoln Cole also builds voice games for Amazon Alexa — explore the Alexa games.
Every available book in Last Light is in Kindle Unlimited — read it free with your subscription, or buy your copy on Amazon.
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