A TECTONIC GOTHIC NOVELLA
Where horror is not a monster, but a flaw in reality's code.
A fact-checker of reality meets a mountain that audits her soul.
Sylvia built her life on certainty. Then a single decimal point destroyed it. Fleeing to the Starlight Wilderness, she sought silence. What she found was the Hum—a vibration in her bones, the mountain's grinding voice.
Rescued from a sentient storm by Orion, a geologist who worships data as scripture, Sylvia is presented with a terrifying truth: the mountain is a conscious system. It hears intent. It corrects anomalies. Her despair is a statistical error it is poised to delete.
Now, trapped in a laboratory-shrine, Sylvia must perform her ultimate audit. Is Orion a madman, a prophet, or merely the system's keeper? And as the Hum becomes her own heartbeat, she faces the final correction: become a ghost in the machine, or a permanent component in its design.
A TECTONIC GOTHIC NOVELLA where the horror isn't in the shadow, but in the structural flaw.