The Lie Called Earth

Three high school students are called to the hospital bedside of a classmate badly injured in a car accident. The classmate, Lavinia Drak, insists her head injury has allowed her to remember the truth: “Your parents aren’t real,” she tells them. “The other students aren’t real. None of this is real. All of this is just a bad copy of Demeter. Earth? It’s just a prison made to punish us.”

More than that, Lavinia tells the three of them that in this supposedly better world of Demeter—a place of fantastic magic and advanced science—each of them has special abilities: Eric, a shy artist at school, was a sorcerer who fed on death, using the energy taken from others to fuel spells. Robbie, a gay theater student here, was a famous inventor, adventurer, and womanizer on Demeter. Bernadette, the school's top athlete, was a biologically engineered living weapon.

Eric, Robbie, and Bernadette all think Lavinia is crazy. That is, until they too begin to see visions of another, more fantastic world in their dreams. And their dreams, in turn, start to awaken powers and talents in them.

Struggling to understand and control their newfound capabilities, Eric, Robbie, Bernadette and Lavinia also find themselves confronting a darker question: if Earth and everyone on it isn’t real, does it matter if they hurt those that get in their way?