Darkness in Sea and Sky

• Main Author: Barnes, Zachary
• Other Authors: James, Tania
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: creative writing; Darkness in Sea and Sky; Deirdre; Bali; Aoife; Mika; Arctic; Greenland
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1920/12154

This thesis has been embargoed for 10 years. It will not be available until April 2031 at the earliest. In Sjomere, the last crumbling city of a far-future earth, the seer Aoife dreams of escaping her life as a slave. As the foretold day approaches, Aoife and her five-year-old son, Mika, a child born of rape, along with Kateri, a twelve-year-old concubine whom Aoife sees as her own daughter, plan a daring escape across the devastated landscape of the Arctic in search of the supposed haven of Aoife’s ancestral homeland. Far to the south, Deirdre is a dying warrior who rejects her 15-year-long exile and returns home to Sjomere only to find her adopted brother Bali—Aoife’s abuser—murdered. Her desire for vengeance and justice puts her on Aoife’s trail and eventually leads her back to the land she loathed and escaped from as a child. It is there, on a small island off now-temperate Greenland, that Aoife and Deirdre confront each other and the inextricable threads that pull them together. 2031-04-28