For countless millennia, the planet Worlorn has been “creation’s castaway,” a cold, barren world drifting aimlessly through the darkness between the stars. When it wanders near the constellation called The Wheel of Fire, Worlorn experiences a brief, bright period of light and life and becomes the setting for an extravagant, multi-cultural celebration: the Festival of the Fringe. A few short years later, when the planet has moved on and the festival has ended, the light begins to die once again.

Into this realm of eternal twilight comes Dirk t’Larien, a rootless interstellar traveler. Dirk has come to Worlorn in response to a summons from Gwen Delvano, the woman who deserted him years before, the woman he has never stopped loving. Desperate to reconnect with Gwen, his “mistress of abandoned dreams,” he finds himself enmeshed in the unforeseen complexities of a world marked by alien sexual and domestic arrangements, unbridgeable cultural barriers, and rigid codes of conduct that can have lethal consequences. It is a world in which words carry extraordinary weight and names have the power to shape—and destroy—a life.