Eight hundred and thirty-two years after the Fall, humanity has rebuilt itself into a fractured world of city-states, rival powers, and half-remembered legends. Beneath drowned ruins, frozen mountains, and buried fortresses, the remnants of the old world still wait.
Elias Trenor has spent his life chasing those remnants.
Restless, brilliant, and determined to escape the polished expectations of the Novalantian Republic, Elias is more at home in the mud and ruins of forgotten cities than in the halls of his influential family. But when he and his engineer friend Kai awaken a dormant Pre-Fall intelligence beneath the drowned remains of Sea-Tac, they uncover something far more dangerous than an archaeological discovery.
The AI's true heart-the Silent Core-still exists.
Sealed inside Shadowcrest, a fortress hidden deep within the frozen Iceshear Range, the Core has spent centuries in silence. It was built to protect humanity from catastrophe. It may have witnessed the end of the old world. It may even have helped cause it. And after eight hundred years alone, no one knows what it has become.
Elias and Kai set out to find it, joined by Liora, a skilled protector with secrets of her own, and drawn into a deadly race against forces that will reshape the world to claim the prize. The militaristic Dominion of Ashan wants the Core as a weapon. The corporate powers of the Aurora Conclave see it as the ultimate asset. The Raithel Ascendancy believes it is divine-a living bridge to the Singularity. Rebels, agents, mercenaries, and zealots all converge on Shadowcrest, each convinced they alone should decide the future.
But the Silent Core has its own will.
As alliances fracture and enemies close in, Elias must decide whether the ancient intelligence is humanity's salvation, its next tyrant, or something stranger than either. To keep it from falling into the wrong hands, he and his unlikely companions will have to trust one another-and perhaps the machine itself.
Because the world has heard the mountain's call.
And the Silent Core has awakened.
