Echoes of Steel Chronicles of Clangor, #1

Matter is a merciful lie. What you touch isn't solid; it is simply a wave vibrating fast enough to feign consistency.

In the vertical city of Argentus, silence is not peace—it is the law. For five thousand years, the Church of the Eternal Compass has imposed the "Age of Silence" to keep the Ignis Machina—a biomechanical god slumbering in the world's core—dormant. Faith is measured in decibels, and physics is controlled by liturgy.

But the system is overheating.

Three "system errors" are about to play the forbidden chord that will wake the god and shatter reality:

• Kaelen: A disgraced Herald who drowns his demons in industrial ethanol. Armed with a Siphonic Steel Zweihänder that no longer glows, he seeks redemption for the daughter he couldn't save from the Church's machinery.
• Vax: A cynical technomancer who has replaced his humanity with circuits. To him, gods are not divine, but thermodynamic parasites with unsustainable energy consumption. His goal isn't to pray to them—it's to hack them.
• Elara: A "Voice" trained to weave shields of light with her throat. Destined to be a living battery for the system, she discovers her song has the power to rewrite matter... or destroy it.

From the crystal towers of the Zenith to the scrapyards of Sublevel 4, the hunt has begun. High Priest Roderick is preparing the Grand Unison, a forced mental fusion designed to silence all individuality. To stop him, Kaelen, Vax, and Elara must do the unthinkable: detune the world.

Welcome to the Age of Clangor.

"Echoes of Steel" is the start of a saga where magic is engineering, gods are operating systems, and the only hope is noise.