Art I made for my fantasy book The Day My Dream Died about a young woman who lives in a world where some people can access a dream realm called the undermind which reflects humanity’s perception of reality. The undermind also breeds dark creatures called fiends which feed on the thoughts and emotions of people. The people who can access the undermind are known as dwellers, and are often relied upon by the people around them to protect, defend and heal those touched by fiends the way a healer wards off disease and helps close wounds. Some societies are more or less proactive in upholding a practice of this tendency, and the view of what it means to have access to the undermind can be starkly different from one culture to another.
Our protagonist, a young woman named Lise, is pursuing her sister who has fled home under the influence of fiends. The problem is, her sister’s fiends seem to have become contagious and spread in the towns she has passed through. Lise finds herself overwhelmed with the number of people dead and dying in her sister’s wake and struggles to catch up in the midst of the terrible chaos. The fiends are devouring people at a rate unseen in recent history. Lise wants to do more than merely survive but even her survival is starting to seem dubious in the face of the fiends’ new developments.
