Aeloria has survived by learning one rule: stay unnoticed.
In Zone Thirteen, a forgotten human settlement built from failing machinery, rusted pylons and whatever can still be scavenged, survival depends upon knowing where to walk, what to take and when to disappear. Aeloria has spent his life doing exactly that, trading recovered technology for enough to keep himself and Larn, the man who raised him, alive.
Then the Zone begins to change.
A damaged glider lies where nothing so intact should remain. Inside it, Aeloria finds a strange shard unlike anything he has ever salvaged. The moment he touches it, dormant systems awaken, energy surges through abandoned machinery, the ground slips out of alignment and something buried within the fractured world responds to him.
When the storm finally passes, the shard has changed more than the landscape.
It has changed Aeloria.
Now organised search teams and unfamiliar machines are moving through Zone Thirteen. Someone knows what happened. Someone is looking for the source. And every new pulse from the shard makes it harder for Aeloria to remain the invisible scavenger he has always been.
With the only home he has ever known closing around him, Aeloria must survive a power he cannot control and forces determined to contain what they do not understand.
Zone Thirteen is Book One of The Chronicles of Aeloria, a character-driven mythic science-fantasy series blending fractured worlds, ancient technology, crystal power, survival and the awakening of a mystery far larger than one forgotten scavenger.