The Dreamtime

Humanity's race to the stars was built on a house of cards. An ancient covenant with an unseen alien race and a technology dependent on Terra's patrons propelled man into the universe. Then the covenant was abandoned, the technology failed and the human empire came to a crashing end. In the midst of the chaos, astral navigator Hafez Awad leads a dying starliner down to Cthulhu, a cold dark world on the fringes of the known universe. Once there, the survivors awaken a creature whose evil exceeds space and time, a thing that has lusted for revenge since the dawn of man. She is old and dying but determined to breed and save her species. Hafez must ward off her advances long enough to seal her doom. To do so, he is forced to battle a warren of dreams crafted like a spider's web to ensnare him, a surreal universe populated by bizarre entities and strangely interwoven with the fabric of time. Dreamtime is the first book of the Somnia Mortis Cycle, a lovingly crafted epic rising from the wreckage of a civilization that flew too high too fast. Hafez Awad's trials and tribulations provide the rock solid foundation for a trilogy that doesn't understand the meaning of the word boundaries.