Millennia ago the Lumen’s rightful home, the planet Lor Annaius, was destroyed. The remaining survivors traversed the stars in search of a new home and found one on the planet Palunia - which they now share with Palunia’s natives, the Grey, unspoken people of little intellect, who gain fulfillment in servitude. When Damaus put his name into the Traveler’s Cup, he wasn’t expecting to be chosen. He did it as a joke to make sure his potential courtship partner found him interesting. But when his highborn name is called out of forty-thousand Grey, the slaves to his people, he has no choice. Not even the elite Lumen are exempt from the law. Now he’s being boarded onto a military-grade starship, about to be launched toward the far ends of the galaxy to retrieve the Lumen’s ancestral treasure, hoping to achieve what no crew has ever done: make it back alive.

For the cover design, our cover cooks created an original illustration inspired by early 20th-century futurism art to rehash the conventions of space opera sub-genre imagery. A stream of galactic colors stems from the green-yellow planet of Palunia, with concentric circles surrounding the most powerful glowing orb in the universe, the Omnilight, as described in the story. The title is composed of a custom geometric typeface with fragmented features that mimic the starship’s shape, described as having “outer panels forming many flat edges".