When humans set sail across the sea, with unadulterated worship shining in their eyes and promises falling from their tongues.

When they looked down and prayed, overcome with a sense of belonging.

When they looked up and gasped, because there were dragons in the sky.

And when they looked back at where they’d been and found more people coming—these with weapons drawn.

A war began for the Fallen Isles, between those who’d come first, and those who’d come second. Generations were born and lived and died at war, but after hundreds of years of defending the islands from the kingdoms and clans of the mainland, a solution was decided upon.

The first dragon led a wing of her brothers and sisters across the sea, where they laid waste to everything they found. Fire spun from their open jaws, burning all that had been built since the Great Fall. Houses crumbled to the ground; forests went as black as night; even the rock ran liquid, hissing where it hit the sea. They left nothing as they blazed up and down the coasts, burning and burning and burning, unstoppable.

Until.

A poison-tipped arrow slipped between the scales of the first dragon. She screamed at the stars as her flight faltered, though her wings pumped to gain height. Then more arrows found their marks in her brothers and sisters. Another polyphonic screech ripped from the first dragon. Fury. Shock. Grief.

The dragons dove, death beating in their inferno hearts. Flame ravaged the earth beneath them, searing the archers’ names from history, and it was there—among the still-burning bones of their enemies—that the dragons collapsed to the ground and slept for a century. And then they, too, died, the first dragon last of all.

THE GREAT ABANDONMENT could have been prevented.

But it was not.

PART ONE

THE HARVEST OF HOPE

CHAPTER ONE

THE GOD SHADOW STRETCHED ACROSS THE SEA, CASTING the city into an early, unwelcome twilight.

I shivered, unable to look away from the length of umbra that darkened everything, or the immense god hunched over on the horizon. Sunlight strained long and golden around his curled shoulders, his bent head, and his lean body—a nightly eclipse that caused a deep, anxious hush to settle across the city of Flamecrest.

Gerel elbowed me. “Stop looking at the sun. It’s not good for your eyes.”

“It doesn’t hurt my eyes anymore. Not since . . . you know.” I didn’t want to talk about the dragon rescue. Not here. We were perched on a roof with ten strangers, all of us hoping to see new ships arrive in the harbor below. This was hardly the best time. “Besides, the sun is hidden. That’s the problem.”

“Try not to stand out. Once the ships arrive, we can go back to the hotel and you can be as odd as you want.”

I sighed and looked back toward Flamecrest Port. No one could say what—or who—was on the ships rumored to arrive tonight, only that they brought hope. And with the god looming on the horizon, bent in contemplative silence, hope was the one thing everyone wanted.