The Waning of Palefire

When the Palefire-infused ink that has illuminated Verath's charts for three centuries begins to fade, cartographer Sera is the first to notice. Her forty-third tidal line comes up the color of wet sand instead of silver-bright light, and she realizes the maps of her world are dying. Every voyage, every coastline, every truth sailors and kings have trusted as living is going dark. Her discovery pulls her into the orbit of Lord Aldric Dune, a lord whose ambitions rise even as the ancient luminescence sinks. Cael Ashward, a young navigator haunted by a voyage he cannot explain, finds himself drawn toward Grandmother Yel's warnings, and toward Sera herself. Yel speaks of an older source, hidden and nearly forgotten, where the Palefire first took root. Maren Voss guards the ledgers that may reveal what was paid for that power three hundred years ago, while Sylas Thorn watches the dimming with a satisfaction that suggests he has waited his whole life for this fading. Across storm-tossed coasts and the salt-bleached archives of Thessaly, Sera and her unlikely allies race to find what is killing the light before the last chart goes dark. But the deeper they dig, the more they suspect the Palefire was never a gift. It was always a debt, and now its collectors have finally come for what they are owed.