In the Aurelian Empire, the screens carry one message, day and night: You are under attack. The enemy is everywhere. Only we can protect you.

Elara, listening to the Elders by the fire, can't look at the glass towers without flinching. A grandmother in the eastern hills keeps singing the old songs while her grandchildren roll their eyes. An eight-year-old asks her mother why the tablet makes her feel empty, and her mother has no answer. A nurse, burned out for the third time, starts to suspect the burning was never her failure and always the system's design.

Something ancient has woken behind the screens. An egregore, a thought-form fed on fear, outrage and the endless scroll, wearing the face of a hollow man called the Host. It binds its Faithful with belonging and permission. It feeds on the protesters who fight it as hungrily as on the crowds who cheer it, and every march, every argument and every sleepless night of rage makes it stronger.

So the people at the edges try the one thing the Empire never planned for. They turn away. And in kitchens and forest clearings, women begin calling on powers older than the Empire: nine faces of the divine feminine, from the Mirror, who turns the gaze back on the liars, to the Refusal, the first woman who said no.

THE AWAKENING is a mythic dystopian fable for readers of Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood, and for anyone who has felt the wrongness of this moment and wondered what to do with it. Short, fierce and strange, it is part warning, part invocation, part love letter to everyone who has wondered if another world was possible.

It is.