D Marie James

Sanctuary's Children D Marie James

The desperate attempt to save humanity from collapsing under its own weight gave birth to the Sanctuary Cities. These fully enclosed environments were supposed to protect those within them from the world beyond their domes. Years of careless pollution had caught up with humanity. Water, soil, and air were turning toxic. Climate change, man made or not, was causing increasingly violent storms to happen more frequently. Droughts and floods were threatening the food sources, and wars were being fought over the ever decreasing supply of resources. The Sanctuary Cities were built in secret. Governments held lotteries to see who would be lucky enough to be chosen to live within them. The people were notified in secret to be relocated to their new homes. One fateful day the domes sealed their residents off from the decaying world beyond their walls. No one knows how long ago the Sanctuary Cities were sealed off. The generations have taken their toll on the world within their confines. The leaders became rulers. Rulers became dictators. Dictators became tyrants. The people of the Sanctuary live in fear of becoming Outcasts or being exiled into the toxic world that they call the Beyond. They are sure that the world is even more toxic now than it was when the domes came into being. Nothing could have survived the Great Chaos. Beyond the domes live the survivors of the Great Chaos. The world had healed itself over the generations since the near destruction of all life. Those descended from the people not chosen to live within the Sanctuaries have adapted to their new world with the lessons of their ancestors deeply rooted into their customs. They shun the technology that nearly destroyed their world, and they have chosen to live in closer harmony with the Earth Mother. They know of the dome that seems to be slowly killing the very earth around it, but they are convinced that no one could have survived in there after so long of it standing in silence. All of that changes when a group of Outcasts find themselves exiled into the Beyond. The Great Chaos caused man to diverge down two paths, but now fate is joining those paths together. The gasping, slow death of the Sanctuary City is looming over them, and they now race against time to insure that the mistakes of the past do not become the path of the future.