The worlds

A wall divides the mortal world from Prythian, the land of the fae — seven immortal courts of impossible beauty and casual cruelty, each ruled by a High Lord of terrible power. When a human huntress kills the wrong wolf in the woods, an ancient bargain drags her across the wall and into a war between the courts, an old curse, and a love that will remake what she is. Bargains are binding, masks hide more than faces, and every court hungers for something it should not want.

London, the Regency, and the glittering marriage market of the ton — where a single Season decides a young woman's whole future, an anonymous scandal sheet can make or ruin any name overnight, and the most advantageous match and the most dangerous desire are almost never the same person. Behind the silk and the string quartets, eight siblings of a great family, their rivals and their matches, court, scheme, and fall in love against every rule the drawing room can invent.

At Basgiath War College, the kingdom's most brutal school, the deadliest quadrant is the riders' — where cadets cross a lethal parapet, survive a year of murder disguised as training, and pray a dragon chooses to bond them rather than incinerate them. The frail daughter of a ruthless general is forced into the riders' quadrant, where the marked children of a crushed rebellion want her dead, the wingleader who should be her enemy is something far more dangerous, and the war on the border is not at all what the kingdom has been told. Bond a dragon or die; trust the wrong person and die faster.

Hogwarts reopens for its alumni: the war is over and the survivors are grown. Aurors, professors, Ministry rising stars and the heirs of the old pure-blood houses keep being pulled back to the castle — for a teaching post, a reunion, an investigation, a debt unpaid. Old rivalries curdle into something more dangerous and more intimate now that everyone is an adult, and a charismatic figure is quietly gathering the disillusioned into a new society that promises the freedom the Ministry never delivered.

The old king is dying and two claimants wait for the throne: the daughter he named heir, and the son his queen bore him. When the crown changes hands, a realm of dragonriders splits down the middle — blacks against greens, sister against brother, dragon against dragon — and a golden age burns itself to ash in a war the histories will call the Dance of the Dragons. Loyalty, ambition, and desire cut across every allegiance; no one at this court gets to want only one thing.

In the autumn of 1985, the adults of Hawkins — a former lab technician, a mechanic, a middle-school teacher, and a local journalist — find themselves drawn together by a series of strange electrical outages and a child's disappearance that echoes the events of years past. As they dig deeper, they uncover a new rift to the Upside Down, one that doesn't just take people but leaves something behind. Now, the found-family that survived the first horrors must face a threat that knows their names, their fears, and the secrets they've kept from each other.