A scout bound by a blood-oath she cannot break. A smith hiding the last free dragon in the empire. And a slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers romance that could free a world — or get them both rendered into chains.

Vesh is the empire's perfect instrument. The oath sealed in her blood at sixteen lets her commander turn her like a key — she finds the warmth that doesn't belong, the hidden dragons the empire melts down into the iron leashes that bind the next generation of riders. She has never once disobeyed. She cannot. The leash does not care what she wants.

Then an ashstorm grounds her dragon and billets her in the forge of a quiet, grey-eyed smith named Sael — a man who will not look at the sky, who runs a fire hot enough that the augurs felt it two hundred miles off, who is the last of a people the empire decided was worth more rendered than alive. Vesh was sent to find exactly what Sael is hiding. And for the first time in four years of clean deliveries, there is a small, treasonous, growing part of her that does not want to hand it over.

Across fifteen days under one low roof, with the empire mustered on the common and the cage waiting in the dark, a captor and her captive circle the one truth that could free them or destroy them both — and a forbidden love catches like fire in dry ash. But the leash can still feel her turn. It cannot stop her hand, but it can make her hand cost her everything. And when the Marshal who counts every warm thing in the empire comes to collect his harvest, Vesh will have to choose between the oath carved into her blood and the man — and the dragon — she was never supposed to want.

The Saga of Falling Dragons is the first book in a sweeping, emotional romantasy series for readers of Fourth Wing, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and Fireborne — a slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers dragon-rider romance about oppression, found family, and the things that fall the furthest learning, at last, how high they were always meant to rise.