A thousand years after the “Daylight Cataclysm,” the Four Kingdoms retreated into darkness. Aetheria ascended into the sea of clouds, its land borne aloft by the 【Eternal Star Chart】, forged from the souls of its entire population. Vilansor kindled a twilight flame that would never go out. Oskel sank into the veins of the earth, using the toll of its hundred-year bell to erase memories. Serenium sank beneath the daylight into the Eclipse Canal, rising only at night.
The people of the Four Kingdoms believed they were survivors. They did not know the entire continent was a sleeping dream, stitched together, and that they were all cells within it.
Jiang Zhu, a common-born boy from Aetheria, has dreamed every night since the age of eight of a burning forest and a black river that never stops flowing. At the age of twelve, during his awakening ceremony, he is measured as “empty,” one of the Faded, who by law must “return to the earth.” As he plunges into the sea of clouds, he is rescued by people who should have fallen to their deaths. The missing Tenth Star, “Qiu Yuan,” tells him: You aren't broken. You're one of the few people on this continent who are awake.
Chen Xiao is a bodiless Shadow Weaver from Serenium, earning her living by fishing dreams out for the nobility. She is the only “Shadow Weaver who can dream” in four hundred years, a thing that should have been eaten. On the night wanted posters cover the outer city, the shadows part to let her pass. The organization's founder tells her: The boy you dreamed of is real.
One is immune to dreams; the other was born in one. Two “half-humans” erased by the world write their names for each other on opposite banks of the black river in the dream layer. Across the river lies the daylight the Four Kingdoms are desperate to keep locked away.
As the tenth centennial bell toll draws near, the dream begins to thin. Someone must keep watch over this dream, and someone must wait in the sea of flowers at its end for the other to awaken.
