The Dream-time

As is the case with many soon-to-be college grads, Gray thinks he has it down, the workings of the world—unlike his parents, one a manic-depressive who committed suicide, the other a pastor who believes the dead communicate with the living via vegetable growth. He has one close friend and that is all he wants; Eliza has been a part of his life since high school, and he loves her deeply. He believes that the world in which he lives consists of everything he can see and touch, nothing more, nothing less. But then one night, his reality turns on its head, leaving him bruised and shaken somewhere far from home—seven centuries into the future ‘far’. In this new place, he learns that the world is not as it should be, that four hundred years ago a great tragedy very nearly destroyed everything, and the poison of that event yet remains in the air and earth, in an otherworldly place known as the dream-time. The people of this future time call it ‘The Fall’, and according to their tales of it, an angel, misguided by her love for humankind, murdered God, and His ghost, driven mad by suffering, would have laid waste the world but for the sacrifice made by another angel. Haunted by visions of Eliza’s brutal death—impossible, for it never happened—dogged by whispers from a stranger within that he, Gray, is her killer—impossible, for he would never do such a thing—he seeks a way home, back to the place where everything makes sense. In his desperate struggle to return, he discovers something that makes the least sense of all: the story of angels and a dead god is somehow his and Eliza’s story.