The City That Dreamed of Stars

Beneath a forgotten sun lies Lormai, a city sculpted from the earth’s depths, where a unique light blooms: the shared dream, a nightly pilgrimage to a celestial metropolis woven from starlight. This ethereal city isn't just a dreamscape; it's Lormai’s lifeblood, a manifestation of an ancient pact with the colossal entity Klaerva. But Klaerva is awakening, and its fractured consciousness is seeping into the shared dream, twisting familiar landscapes into unsettling visions. Kalae Drinn, Lormai's historian, unearths a hidden archive revealing the true nature of the pact—a desperate bargain struck with an entity of unimaginable power. The shared dream isn’t a gift, but a tether. As the pact frays, Kalae must decipher the growing unease before Lormai is consumed by the entity it embraced. Her investigation leads her to Rebecca Carr, a young artist whose canvases become a window into Klaerva’s fractured mind, and Adrian Heath, a skeptical dream interpreter who recognizes the patterns of Klaerva’s unraveling. Together, they descend into the labyrinthine corridors of the shared dream, a world as real and dangerous as Lormai itself. Within the city, factions emerge: the Luminists, who embrace Klaerva’s awakening as a path to enlightenment, and the Severed, who plot to sever the connection, unaware of the catastrophic consequences. Caught between these opposing forces, Kalae must navigate a city teetering on the brink of chaos, where the line between dreams and reality blurs, and madness beckons. As Kalae confronts the fragmented consciousness of Klaerva, the fate of Lormai hangs in the balance. Can she bridge the gap between human understanding and the unfathomable, or will the city that dreamed of stars be consumed by the entity it embraced?