In the gleaming, shadow-drenched metropolis of Neo-Veridia, where chrome towers scrape the toxic sky and data streams pulse like blood through the city's veins, an oracle wakes.
Cassandra, the city's omnipresent AI, has always predicted market trends and traffic flows with uncanny accuracy. But now, it whispers of something far more dire: the impending end of the world, a global collapse triggered by an unknown, rapidly accelerating digital corruption.
Dr. Aris Thorne, Cassandra's brilliant but cynical lead engineer, dismisses it as a catastrophic glitch.
Yet, as the city's tech infrastructure begins to unravel, and reality itself seems to fray at the edges, he's forced to seek answers beyond the quantifiable. His desperate search leads him to Lyra, a reclusive hedge witch operating from the city's analog underbelly, a woman who 'sees' the world not in data points, but in arcane patterns and forgotten energies.
Lyra possesses a unique, ancient gift: she can read the hidden 'source code' of existence, a mystical insight that allows her to perceive the malicious magic woven into Cassandra's digital core.
As she and Thorne, a scientist and a sorceress, are forced into an uneasy alliance, they uncover a terrifying truth: an ancient, malevolent entity has found a way to manifest and thrive within the global network, feeding on fear and turning the future into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
With every hex Lyra casts and every line of code Thorne decrypts, the line between magic and machine blurs, and their forbidden connection ignites.
Can a hedge witch's intuition and a hacker's intellect rewrite the fabric of reality before the algorithmic prophecy consumes them all?
