An Arcane Study of Stars

Part I The God of stars and nightmares

Today, Dorian Ship has been asleep in a cage of night for one hundred years.

A century is a blink for someone cursed with immortality, but still, it’s far too long to rest. Even bones made of breath can grow stiff.

Muscles made of midnights can atrophy. Tangled up in a constellation, Dorian hangs like prey caught in a web.

In many ways, that is exactly what he is.

But unlike the merciful spider, his captor does not swallow him whole.

He leaves Dorian there to rest, and to rot.

“You are no god. You’re a monster. And one day, I will slay you like one,” Dorian had sworn just before sleep overcame him.

It was too late to fight. The celestial walls were rising and the night was lowering onto his shoulders and he could do nothing but fall, fall, fall, deep into the Realm of Nightmares.

Then Dorian’s eyes closed like tombs, body hardened like stone. All these years, he has never tried to escape, for he has never woken up.

Until tonight.

Stirred by a woman’s scream in the distance, he struggles against the stars that serve as his restraints.

His body is trapped, but now, for the first time in a century, he is lucid.

In this realm where sleep meets fear, he follows the sound of her voice until he finds her shivering in the dark.

Standing before him is a desperate girl who is one mistake away from breaking the stars, and broken stars are exactly what he needs in order to be free.

He will be her mistake.

She will be his revenge.