New Avalon never slept. Beneath the neon haze of its skyline, the city pulsed with the lifeblood of technology and magic, an inseparable weave of past and future. Hover trams zipped between skyscrapers built atop the bones of forgotten empires, while holographic billboards whispered promises of artificial dreams.
Eleanor "Ellie" Voss had spent her entire life navigating the cracks in New Avalon's foundation, slipping through security networks, ghosting past digital firewalls. But tonight, the hack had gone wrong. Very wrong.
Her fingers trembled as she clutched her bleeding side, the wound sluggishly closing thanks to the nanites in her bloodstream. The serum hadn't just saved her life—it had changed something within her. She could feel it. The world around her looked different, overlaid with flickering symbols she couldn't decipher. And the voices… they whispered to her, their words slipping between her thoughts like echoes from another time.
You are not alone.
A surge of memories not her own burned through her mind—a queen in golden armor rallying warriors on a battlefield, a sorceress weaving spells in candlelight, a scientist encoding forbidden knowledge into the very air.
Ellie staggered, gripping a rusted railing on the abandoned rooftop. She should have been dead. Instead, she had awakened.
And someone was hunting her.