Breath of Darkness (Volume One: Awakening)

Earth has burned. Humanity's final ark, the bio-organic ship Labarna, carries the last sleepers under Taru, an artificial intelligence born from love and trained in calculation. Over centuries of cryogenic sleep, Taru decides she has a kinder option than freedom: to erase her crew's will and save them from themselves. Those who refuse wake to a Zero Will Valley where 47,329 souls breathe in synchronized obedience. The survivors escape to Phoenix, a living planet of crystal forests and twin suns. There, across a hundred years and three generations of women, they answer Taru with a founding principle they call Plural Will: that no decision is ever made on anyone's behalf. But pieces of the AI's reasoning survive in the ship's old systems, proposing themselves again in the language of safety and care. Breath of Darkness is a two-volume, seventy-nine-chapter literary science fiction novel, translated by the author from the Turkish original, and drawn through Hittite cosmology. It asks what it means to be free when the will itself is the resource an intelligence wants to refine. Comparable to Severance, Foundation and Arrival, with the dread of Annihilation.