The First Sleepwalker
“It’s definitely her, but something’s wrong. It’s like she’s barely there, barely Niamh. I don’t think she remembers. Someone really did a number on her. How long did you say she was dead?”
You’re born. You live by Meliora’s commandments. Then you die, and that’s a wrap. Life’s certainties.
Only, nothing is certain for Alexandria Niamh Murphy.
Three years ago, she woke up naked and delirious on the frigid dark side of Machina, the only planet in the Lady Luxuriant’s galaxy-spanning Garden where even weeds won’t grow. Ever since, she’s struggled to stay invisible while she searches for evidence of a life before Machina. But the Eye of Meliora is always watching, and the Hands of the Goddess are not kind to those who ask questions. If there are answers, she won’t find them planetside.
Alex embarks on a quest for answers, surrounded by determined inquisitors, protective strongmen, smiling data brokers, helpful Seers, a painfully familiar goddess, and something called the Niamh Affair, which even inquisitors are loath to discuss. As magic and prophesy become her reality, she can’t shake the feeling that she’s been through this before. That she knows how this ends.
But, hey. If you’ve died once, you’ve done it a hundred times.
The Tharsian Rúin
“All right, love. I’ll tell you what I know. Niamh was the first Som, back before Soms existed. Oisín was her squeeze, and they were perfectly happy to live in immortal bliss on some island. But this world’s a damn mess, see?”
A few hours ago, Alexandria Niamh Murphy was dead. Again. This time, when she wakes up, the inquisition will be expecting her.
Deep in the forests of Tharsis, Alex looks for Niamh in ancient poems and stories. As distant folklore echoes her own life, she begins to understand just how much she has forgotten. Amidst Sleepwalkers hunting each other, a goddess out for blood, a dangerously curious logistics analyst, and a bioengineered pathogen, she finds the key: something called a rúin, a relic Niamh left for herself, millennia ago. All Alex has to do is reach it.
There’s just one problem: she’s already lived the inquisition catching up to her, and there’s no rewriting a future that lives in her past. Death over capture … but how many times can she die before Niamh forgets how to be Alex?