Jamie is basically your average New England academic in-training—she has a strong queer relationship, an esoteric dissertation proposal, and inherited generational trauma. But she has one extraordinary secret: she's also a powerful witch. Serena, Jamie's mother, has been hiding from the world in an old one-room schoolhouse for several years, grieving the death of her wife and the simultaneous explosion in her professional life. All she has left are memories.

Saoirse yearns to be powerless. Cursed from childhood with a volatile magic, she's managed to imprison it within, living under constant terror that one day it will break free. And it does, changing everything. Horrified at her loss of control, Saoirse’s parents offer her hand to the cold and ruthless Stone King. Knowing she'll never survive such a cruel man, Saoirse realizes there is only one path forward…she must break her curse.

Fi is a smuggler who ferries contraband between worlds, stockpiling funds and stolen magic to keep her village self-sufficient—free from the blood sacrifices humans have paid to an immortal species for centuries. The forest whispers of a time when one world wasn’t shattered into many and flesh-devouring beasts hadn’t yet crept from the shadows, armed with black antlers, slender tails, claws, and cunning fangs. Now, mortals are offered as food to pacify these immortal kings, exchanged for protection, and the precious silver energy that fuels everything from transport to weaponry.

Two decades ago, the Bloodmoons ruthlessly murdered Saffron Killoran’s parents, destroying her idyllic childhood. Hell-bent on revenge, she lies her way into Silvercloak Academy—the training ground for her city’s elite order of detectives—with a single goal: to bring the Bloodmoons to justice. But when Saff’s deception is exposed, rather than being cast out, she’s given a rare opportunity: to go undercover and tear the Bloodmoons down from the inside.

With nothing but a limping ship and an outdated mask to her name, Wylla needs a big pay day. When the alert goes out that a lucrative piece of tech lies hidden on a nearby planet, she calls on all the swiftness of her prey-animal instincts to beat other hunters to it. What you found wasn’t your ticket out—it was my corpse wearing an AI mask. When you touched the mask, you heard my voice. A consciousness spinning through metal and circuits, a bodiless mind, spun to life in the HAWK’s temporary storage. I crystallized and realized: I was alive.