Apprentice archivist Freya Vindsen is weeks from graduating—and from gaining access to the forbidden history that drove her brother, her hero, to abandon her years ago. Though the Nebula above her rainforest village grants her visions of the past, her untrained magic refuses to reveal what happened to him. Longing to reunite with him, she’s desperate for any clue that will finally allow her to leave home in search of him.

Zan Sango, an underestimated blacksmith’s apprentice whose world has always revolved around Freya, clings tightly to the people he loves, and fears Freya will abandon him on her quest. 

A vision demands Freya choose between two divergent fates: glory that will immortalize her name but cause her suffering, or grace that will grant her a content life history will forget. And when her choice propels her and Zan to the front lines of a burgeoning war—spreading from ziggurat temples to bamboo forests—and they learn how it’s connected to her brother’s disappearance, they each find their sense of identity upended. With danger around them, Freya races to find her brother and Zan witnesses tyranny firsthand and must decide who he is beyond her, and whether he’s a man who crushes cruelty or builds for the future.

If neither seizes control of their fate in time, the choices they make may cost them more than their lives—they may cost their continent its last chance at freedom.