I have one rule: don't look at the Ashenwild. I've broken it every day of my life. For twenty-two years I've been the quiet record keeper of Caldenmere — a village pressed against a forest no one enters and returns from unchanged. I copy documents. I file reports. I've never told a single soul about the nightmare that visits me every night — a dragon, calling my name from inside fire. Then the King's Blade rode into my village. Caspian is cold, precise, and the most dangerous man I've ever stood in a room with. He isn't here for a routine audit. He's hunting something the crown erased from history two generations ago — and when the ground shook and a voice made of flame called my name from beyond the treeline, I understood the myth I never believed in had just found me first. I carry Dragonblood. Ancient magic, buried so deep in my bloodline I never knew it was sleeping inside me. The crown doesn't call it a gift. They call it contamination. And they've been killing people like me for fifteen years — before the magic wakes. Now I have to decide who to trust. The elder who raised me and never told me the truth. The best friend who's been protecting me in secret for years. Or the King's own Blade — the man sent to find me, who might be the only thing standing between me and the people who want me dead before I understand what I am. Some bloodlines don't fade. They wait. And something ancient has been waiting three hundred years for me.