The bond is built. It's also fragile enough that the wrong word could shatter it.

Three days of failed attempts have left Ryn with no confidence and a Council running out of patience. The Guild is still tearing through the crystal network, the weather across half the mountain domain is fracturing, and the Elders are fracturing with it — factions forming, allegiances shifting, a vote moving in the shadows before the demonstration even takes place.

For Ryn and Eskarith It may already be too late.

When a fall from Eskarith's back strains the bond, the only way forward is down — into the mindscape, into the caves, into the hardest work either of them has faced.

And underneath all of it, something older is waking. A prophecy the Stormclaw Sisters refuse to interpret clearly. A pattern that has been waiting, preserved in crystal, for exactly this configuration of people and choices and power.

While Ryn and Eskarith build in isolation, and Elders plot in the hallways of Stormcrest, a disgraced Guild researcher crosses the Crimson Desert with stolen specimens — and a theory about what the bond actually is, and what it's worth to the right people.

Ideas fly faster than riders.
The bond they build in the dark is real. But will it survive the light?

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Content warnings: political conspiracy, body transformation, grief, LGBTQ+ characters and themes, addiction in secondary character.

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