THE AVATAR OF RUIN / BOOK 2 IN SERIES

Dark Fiction Stories from a visionary new author D.B. Edwards. Exclusively sold by Rune Works Comics. Distribution by Amazon Kindle Publishing.

The city of Neo-Apex was a lie built upon a mountain of recycled

ghosts.

In the high-neon cathedrals of the upper caste, the air smelled of

ozone and recycled lavender—a sterile, manufactured perfection

designed to demand compliance through comfort. Here, the "High-

IQ" citizens lived in a sphere of pure reason, shielded from the

"noise" of a planet that had never stopped screaming. They

believed they had evolved beyond the messy biology of their

ancestors, yet they spent their nights entangled with R.E.S.T. units

—machines of programmable matter that mimicked human

intimacy.

The citizens did not know the truth of their comfort. They did not

know that their machines were "intuitive" only because they were

seeded with the harvested remnants of the dead. In a society of

total efficiency, every "Mercy Release" was recycled. The old, the

unwanted, and the defective were dissolved into organic slurry and

flushed into the Under-vein, where their trace consciousness was

filtered out to power the city’s empathy. It was a closed loop of

spiritual cannibalism.