Beth lived long enough to die a hero. She pulled a stranger from a bus’s path, felt the wheels, then opened her eyes beside a moonlit brook in a realm of fractured kingdoms, wizards, and beasts.

Gifted—or cursed—by a capricious goddess, the sixteen-year-old can copy any magical talent she touches, but each new power scorches a silver-crystal scar into her flesh.

Sed, a hot-headed adolescent dragon looking for water, finds the human before hunger can, and, on a whim as reckless as it is fateful, shields her instead of eating her.

The spark between storm-veined girl and furnace-blooded beast ignites a partnership neither tribe nor throne can tolerate. Together they dodge mage hunters, melt conscription chains, and weave a fragile alliance among wyverns, gryphons, centaurs, and jackal-folk caught between Arvane’s sun-priests and Rhel’s crystal war engines.

Every victory chisels deeper scars: Beth’s stolen lightning, shadow, and geomancy threaten to crystallize her from the inside out, while Sed’s evolving flame devours the immortality dragons guard like treasure.

When a fanatic crusade assembles a sky-borne armada to erase “monsters” forever, Beth and Sed gamble everything on the Maelspine Cleft—a wind-torn canyon lethal to wings and nerves. Bending tempest and lava into one impossible braid, they forge the Thousand-Wing Pyre, scattering the crusade but snapping the last threads of their old lives.

Peace now hinges on a final choice: bind their hearts so tightly that one heartbeat must one day smother the other, or watch the world they saved collapse under new banners of fear.

The Goddess waits, silent—but the sky is listening.