The war against the Marrow Regent is going badly: even Cloudmere's stonebound councils and the river guilds of Embergate are taking notice. Rion Ashfell scans the obituary columns and Sky-Lantern Rolls of The Brass Herald looking for familiar names. Archon Iyra Vell is absent from the High Aerie Lyceum for long stretches, and the Circle of Winds has already suffered losses. And yet...as in all wars, life threads on. Sixth-year apprentices learn to Slipstep—vanishing from one tower and stumbling into the next in a gust of singed air—and lose a few eyebrows in the process. The twins Cinder and Jest expand their prankworks stall at Smoke Market. Teenagers flirt and fight on the rope-bridges between dormitories. Lessons are never straightforward, though Rion receives extraordinary help from a nameless, long-vanished mage whose tart marginalia fills a battered grimoire. The school whispers call the author the Half-Scaled Scribe, and their notes are ingenious, intimate, and sometimes perilous.
It is the home front that takes center stage while wyvern wings blacken the horizon. Rion tries to uncover the identity of the Half-Scaled Scribe, the previous owner of his windcraft compendium, "Treatise on Vents and Vipers," whose pages are veined with moonwound ink and sly amendments that turn harmless puffs into razor squalls. But his life tips forever when Aunt Maela—lighthouse-warden of Wyvernwatch and the woman who raised him—is murdered before his eyes by a masked rider piping a bone flute that makes the shadows heel like dogs.
With Archon Vell's terse guidance and a ring of forbidden sky-keys, Rion follows wind-trails into the buried past: temple vaults cracked open under Needlecliff, saltglass catacombs beneath Kettleford, letters penned by a clever, lonely boy named Tareth Coilborn who would one day call himself the Marrow Regent and bind his will to an ancient wyvern called Gravecoil. What emerges is not pure monster nor pure myth, but a map of hungers. Somewhere within it lies a single soft place, thin as frost at dawn. To reach it, Rion must decide what he is willing to break—oaths, friendships, perhaps his own name—and what must remain unbroken, even as the wyverns close their shadows over the sun.
