HOLLOWLARK: The Cradle of Nine Suns

The story

On Hollowlark, a tidally-frozen world strung beneath a broken orbital ring, nine artificial suns once hung in the sky; eight are dead husks and the ninth flickers on a decade-long death rattle, leaving cities of glass drowned under creeping black ice. WREN, a mute salvage-diver, works the corpse of Sun Four with her rigged light-harvesting harpoon, scavenging trapped photons to trade for heat. Descending into the sun's cracked core she finds not scrap but a SEED — a fist-sized ember that pulses in answer to her heartbeat, the last unlit sun the builders hid rather than deployed. The Warden order, masked keepers who decided humanity survives better in managed darkness, detects the ember's pulse and sends VOSK, their most decorated hunter, to retrieve and extinguish it. Wren flees across the ring's shattered spans on a stolen light-sled, pursued through frozen cloud-canyons, a graveyard of dead suns, and the vast Ember Vault where the builders' machinery still turns. She rescues MOTH, a scavenger child, whose lantern-signals become their shared language. In the Vault, the seed begins to consume Wren — every use burns light through her veins, leaving glowing fracture-lines across her skin. Vosk corners them on the ignition spire and unmasks: beneath is a face already lit with the same fractures, a previous carrier who chose to burn out rather than ignite, believing a new sun would boil the ice and drown what remains. Wren refuses the choice. She rewires the spire to a slow burn, feeds the seed her own accumulated light, and ignites a tenth sun at half-brightness — not a blaze but a dawn. The ice recedes by inches, not miles. Wren, hollowed and half-luminous, cannot follow the survivors down; she remains on the spire as the living regulator, and Moth signals up to her every night with a lantern from the thawing city below.

Cast

• Wren to carry the sun-seed to the spire and give her world a dawn
• Vosk to extinguish the seed and keep the sky permanently dark
• Moth to find someone who will not leave them behind
• The Seed to be lit