Velgrimor

Vel is twenty-one, an orphan, and completely alone. She works part-time at a municipal library in Velgrimor, a small European city frozen in time, eats once a day at a community kitchen, and sleeps in a cheap hotel room with walls covered in images of the cosmos. She has no family, no friends, no future — only an inexplicable obsession with the universe that borders on the spiritual. She dreams of space the way others dream of love: desperately, hopelessly, knowing it will never happen. But the universe has been watching her longer than she knows. What begins as the quiet, melancholic life of a girl surviving on the margins slowly transforms into something extraordinary — a journey that will take Vel far beyond anything she ever imagined, and far beyond anything humanity has ever known.