Prince Kael of Emberfall was born with a secret that should have never existed— the Drake Mark, the ancient symbol of a dying dragonblood lineage feared across the continent. The mark grants strength, fire, and a bond to creatures long thought extinct. It also curses the bearer with madness… and eventual transformation into a monster. When the queen is assassinated, Kael is framed and banished beyond the Frostborder, condemned to die in the wilderness where no human survives. But he does survive. Because something ancient answers his blood.

In the sprawling empire of Valeria, progress is everything—airships crowd the skies, steam engines roar through the streets, and the greatest minds compete to join the Imperial Forge, the institution that powers the world. Elias Thorne should have lived and died as a nobody: a factory rat, a scrap collector, a kid invisible to everyone but the smog. Until the day he bleeds metal. When a street accident tears open his skin, gears and silver veins spill out instead of blood. The Empire calls it an abomination. The underground calls it a miracle.

Everyone believes Prince Kaiden Ashfall died the night the royal palace burned. They are wrong. He survived— barely— saved only because the curse placed on him at birth finally awakened. Now he is something no kingdom is prepared for: a Voidmarked, a human bound to the forbidden shadows that exist between life and death.

Humanity once ruled the stars— until the Starforge Network, the ancient system that powered every colony, collapsed overnight. Civilizations fell. Starships died. Planets went dark. Now, two hundred years later, nineteen-year-old Arin Kael works as a scrap diver on a dying mining world, scavenging old wrecks to survive. He is nobody—weak, poor, forgotten. Until he discovers a buried Starforge Core, a technology older than every known race.