A stranger walks out of the northern wilderness. Something nests in the deathfields beyond the walls.
A frontier settlement starving after sabotage. Something shrieking in the dark beyond the tree line. And a stranger arriving from the north, gaunt and scarred, carrying marks that haven't been seen in a generation.
The first hunt. The first cost. The question that will define everything that follows: what is he willing to destroy in order to protect strangers who may never understand what he is?
A brood of shrieking, raptor-bodied creatures led by something far worse — a Fiend whose wingspan blacks out the sky and whose intelligence makes the lesser harpies look like animals. She has nested somewhere she should not be. What she has built her nest from is the reason Tarahn cannot walk away.
Not a love interest but something rarer: unconditional warmth. An innkeeper who opens her door, looks at the gaunt stranger, and says: 'You look like you need feeding.' The first person since the Sundering to treat Tarahn like a human being.
Every hunt demands a sacrifice. This one is personal in a way Tarahn did not expect, and the things he carries away from it — small enough to fit in his hands — will weigh on him for the rest of the series.
A boy learning to be a weapon. Barely functional, grieving, uncertain whether the world even wants him in it. By the end, he has learned that he can do something that matters. The shape of his new existence begins here.