Six months into "The Great Isolation," the air has stopped carrying sound. No sirens, no laughter, no warnings. For Dave, who was born deaf, it’s a strange gift—he can finally hear the symphony of his own body. But for Sonia, the only person who still hears it all, the world is a screaming, mechanical graveyard.

FIVE YEARS AGO, THE REPUBLIC FELL. TODAY, THE DESERT WAKES UP. Garon Ironheart, once the legendary "Lion of Eldoria," now commands nothing but a dying campfire and a huddle of starving survivors. He sits on the edge of the Ashari wastes, his sword undrawn for three hundred miles, waiting for the ruthless Kheldari raiders to finish what they started. Garon isn't living; he’s just taking a long time to die. Until a ghost stumbles out of the heat haze. A scout, thought dead since the siege, collapses at Garon’s feet babbling madness—of a "light that casts no shadow" and a deep, tectonic thrumming beneath the sands. The Ancients’ technology isn't dead. It’s just sleeping. And the Kheldari have found the alarm clock. To save the few souls he has left, the weary general must lead them where no army has ever survived: into the Whispering Sands. It is a place under a bruised violet sky, where a dropped water skin can turn the ground into an explosion of razor-glass, and where a city of black basalt waits to drink their heat. The Lion is old, broken, and out of time. But he has one last roar left in him.

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the sovereignty movement in Alberta, and I think I’ve finally figured out the perfect analogy. Imagine...