The Mermaid Who Collected Human Dreams

Deep beneath the ocean, where sunlight has never reached, Maeve Hawthorne collects the dreams humans lose while they sleep. To the people of the Deep Blue, these glowing fragments are little more than discarded psychic residue. To Maeve, they are priceless pieces of life-memories of laughter, first kisses, childhood wonder, hope, fear, and love. She preserves them in a hidden underwater sanctuary, building a breathtaking galaxy of human dreams.But the ocean is dying.A mysterious Grey Sickness is spreading through the Deep Blue, turning coral to ash and slowly destroying Maeve's sister, Freya. Desperate to save her, Maeve tries using a beautiful human dream as a cure, only to watch it collapse into deadly grey dust. She realizes that collecting dreams is no longer enough. Something is fundamentally wrong with the relationship between the human world and the sea.Then the ancient Zane reveals the truth: dreams were never meant to be hoarded. They are part of a living cycle. Humans dream, dreams descend into the ocean, and their energy must eventually be released back into the world. Maeve's beautiful sanctuary has become a tomb of light, and her attempt to preserve human imagination has unknowingly helped starve the sea.With the Deep Blue collapsing around her, Maeve becomes the Weaver of Tides. Using bioluminescent silk, strands of her own hair, and thousands of captured dreams, she creates a Great Weave capable of carrying human imagination back to the surface. But the final act will demand the sacrifice of the one dream she has treasured above all others: the golden Anchor Dream belonging to Oliver, the human boy whose childhood yearning for the mysterious mermaid once gave Maeve a reason to live.Beautiful, imaginative, and bittersweet, *The Mermaid Who Collected Human Dreams* is a lyrical fantasy about love, sacrifice, memory, and the courage to let go of what we treasure so that something greater can live.