For three hundred years, winter has not ended.
Since the steward-knight Veyne Asthorn sealed the garden-kingdom of Edenhal behind its ancient Gate, L menfall has lain frozen beneath the Long Winter - and an ancient prophecy has waited, half-believed, for hands brave enough to fulfill it.
Liora Ashwen has spent her life as a keeper-scribe, copying sacred words she never expected to live. She tends her grief the way she tends her duties: quietly, carefully, never trusting love enough to risk losing it twice. When a disgraced knight collapses at her abbey's gate, fleeing creatures that should never have found him, she discovers that the prophecy she's copied a hundred times may finally be asking something of her.
Cassian Thorne broke his sacred oath once, at a terrible cost, and has spent three years walking penance instead of roads that lead anywhere. He doesn't believe grace was ever meant for a man like him - until a Warden's lantern and her unflinching faith begin to make him wonder if he's been wrong about everything, including himself.
Together, with an oath-broken ranger and a runaway boy at their side, they must gather three lost relics - a Bough, a Flame, and a Tear - through haunted woods, forgotten ruins, and ash-choked wastes where a patient darkness waits to turn every love they carry into a weapon against them.
But the hardest trial isn't finding the lights. It's discovering whether mercy is large enough to reach even the man who started the winter - and whether two wounded hearts can learn to love each other not in spite of their scars, but through them.
A sweeping tale of courage, sacrifice, and the kind of grace that asks everything and gives more.