About The Zepherous Chronicles Episode I: Rebirth by Z.N. Cruz
Time doesn’t always shatter. Sometimes, it glitches.
For twelve-year-old Zeph, mornings are supposed to be about Lucky Charms, cartoons, and racing out the door with her best friend Dee. But when the school day freezes mid-step and a mysterious older version of herself appears with a glowing shard, her world fractures into something she never imagined.
The moon flickers. The halls fall silent. A warning is whispered: you are not the glitch—you are the key. Suddenly, Zeph finds herself caught between timelines, carrying a secret she can’t explain and a memory she isn’t sure she was meant to keep.
Blending pop culture nostalgia with the wonder of a coming-of-age fantasy, Rebirth is a story about friendship, memory, and the weight of choices hidden in ordinary places. A cereal box becomes a vault. A teddy bear becomes a guardian. And a girl on the edge of adolescence discovers that every glitch is really the start of a bigger story.
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Author Bio:
Z.N. Cruz is a speculative fiction author whose work explores the emotional intersections of time, memory, and identity. She is best known for The Zepherous Chronicles, an ongoing multiverse-spanning saga that blends grounded human experience with metaphysical science fiction. Her writing is marked by its introspective tone, lyrical prose, and the recurring question: What do we become when the past refuses to stay behind us? Cruz began developing the world of Zepherous during a period of personal transition, inspired by her own reflections on nostalgia, loss, and the fragmentation of self. Drawing from classic sci-fi influences, emotional realism, and a deep appreciation for the unseen threads between people and timelines, her work invites readers to not just escape-but to feel. In Episode I – Rebirth, Cruz introduces readers to Zeph, a girl on the edge of a fracture she doesn’t yet understand. What begins as a quiet, tender origin soon spirals into a deeper unraveling of time and consequence. The story is more than science fiction- it is, at its heart, a meditation on grief, fate, and the echoes we carry. When not writing, Cruz is often storyboarding visual elements of the Zepherous universe, curating artifacts and designs that bring her world into tactile form. Her passion for immersive storytelling spans across mediums, from books and merchandise to art and digital experiences. She currently lives in Southern California, with too many notebooks, a rotating archive of reference materials, and the quiet belief that every story – no matter how fractured – can be mended.