Iron Shepherd

IRON SHEPHERD In the drowned cities of 2075, the water is a cage. The truth is a weapon. Kaelen Vesper is a "mender," a scavenger-mechanic in the Deep-Wards of Neo-Venice who survives by repairing the discarded technology of a lost age. He knows the ocean rose decades ago to drown the world. He just doesn't know why. When Kaelen finds a 50-year-old "black box" embedded in a dead smuggler's prosthetic arm, he uncovers the truth: the Great Inundation wasn't a natural disaster. It was a corporate massacre, orchestrated by the Aethelgard Corporation to ensure the survival of the elite in a sealed, high-tech spire looming over the waves. Now, hunted by the assassins who built the new world, Kaelen must navigate the collapsing architecture of a vertical city—from the iron catacombs of the submerged subway system to the sterile heights of the executive suites. As he integrates his own biology with the lost Vesper-Protocol, Kaelen finds himself becoming the "Resurrection Key"—a living bridge between the world that died and the one struggling to grow. But to save the Silt Republic and bring the dry land back, Kaelen must face the architects of the conspiracy, the awakened elite of 2025 who are still in their silver suits, still pulling the strings, and still determined to turn the earth into a toxic graveyard rather than share the air. Iron Shepherd is a visceral, action-packed biopunk epic that asks: when the world is broken, is the mender's job to pick up the pieces, or to rewrite the blueprint entirely?