BradenBaum
Braden George Baum is twenty-eight years old, a courtesy clerk at the Safeway on Brooks Road in Windsor, California, living a life so ordinary it sometimes feels like a dream he can't quite shake himself out of. But he carries something extraordinary inside him: the memory of five childhood friends he met at Anova - a wolf named Derek, a shark named Marcus, a crow named Elliot, a crocodile named Garrett, and a cobra named Vincent - who grew up beside him in the golden hills of Sonoma County before life scattered them to opposite ends of the world. He told himself that chapter was closed. He was wrong.\n\nOn Christmas Day, 2026, the sky over New York City goes dark. Not from clouds. From a shadow - a shadow cast by something that shouldn't exist, something that makes skyscrapers look like toothpicks and city blocks look like sidewalk cracks. Within hours, the same impossible reports pour in from London, Moscow, Düsseldorf, and Rio de Janeiro: titans walking the earth, Giga-class colossi whose every footstep registers on seismographs across the hemisphere. Governments scramble. Militaries mobilize. The world fractures at its seams. And Braden Baum stands in a Safeway parking lot in Windsor, staring at shaky cell-phone footage on his phone screen, feeling the blood drain from his face - because he recognizes them. Every single one of them. He would know those faces anywhere, even now, even at the scale of gods.\n\nHis childhood friends have come back. They have grown into something the human language has no word for, their bodies sprawling across counties, their voices shaking the atmosphere, their power absolute and terrifying and utterly without limit. They are not the laughing, scrappy kids he remembers from the schoolyard at Anova. Power has rewritten them. Size has unmade whatever softness they once had. They are vengeful. They are drunk on their own enormity. They are coming home - and Braden is the only person on earth who might be able to reach through them.