Seeds Of Ash
When the sky went silent, the roots began to whisper.
Twelve-year-old Aiden Reyes never fit in. A gifted loner with a mind wired for blueprints and broken circuits, he spent his days tuning into the static of the world, searching for patterns no one else could hear. But on the night the Verdant Strain Theta—the Green Rot—emerged from the depths of the Miraat jungle, Aiden’s world collapsed in fire, spores, and silence.
Saved by a hardened trio of survivors—former contractor Nathan Ward, his brother Cal, and the sharp-eyed smuggler Tessera Dunn—Aiden grows up in the shadows of a dying world, learning that survival is earned with blood and silence. But when he stumbles upon a buried facility beneath the mountains, Aiden awakens something older than any military project, older than even the outbreak itself: The System, an adaptive AI built by a forgotten man to help humanity outlast the inevitable.
The System chooses Aiden as its host.
Now, as the infection mutates and whispers of intelligent infected spread across the wasteland, Aiden must balance leadership, grief, and the haunting question that echoes through the System’s code:
What’s the cost of saving what’s left?
And what happens when the tool designed to protect begins to evolve... without you?
The Last Bastion is a gritty, emotional sci-fi survival epic about legacy, sacrifice, and the brutal kindness of building something that lasts.
