shadow_jaid
When the world ended, it didn't happen with a bang it happened with a heartbeat.
Three years after the collapse, humanity is scattered, broken, and learning to survive among the ruins of a world that used to feel safe. A strange parasitic phenomenon called The Veil swept across continents, turning the infected into ghostlike echoes of who they once were not monsters, not zombies... but people trapped between memory and hunger. Some whisper that they can still feel emotion; others swear they're evolving.
Seventeen-year-old Eris Calder, once quiet and careful, has spent the last thousand days pretending she isn't afraid. After losing her family in a single night, she survives by memorizing escape routes, keeping her heart locked down, and never letting anyone get close enough to become a weakness again.
Then she meets Kael Riven a reckless, bright-eyed wanderer with a scar across his collarbone shaped like a crescent moon and a past he refuses to talk about. He should be a threat. He should be someone she walks away from.
But instead... he becomes the first thing in years that makes her feel alive.
When a rumor spreads about a hidden refuge called The Solace, where scientists may have found a way to reverse The Veil, Eris and Kael are forced into an uneasy partnership. Their journey pulls them through abandoned cities swallowed by nature, makeshift rebel towns, and territories ruled by people more dangerous than the infected ever were.
As their bond deepens, Eris starts to fear something far more devastating than The Veil:
Loving someone in a world that could take them at any second.
But Kael carries secrets ones that could shatter everything Eris thinks she knows about The Veil... and about herself. And when the truth finally surfaces, she'll have to decide whether love is a strength in the apocalypse or the most fatal weakness.
In a world unraveling, two hearts learn that sometimes the last thing worth saving is each other.