The gods of Elyndra rule from the Radiant Spire, a floating citadel of light that hangs above the clouds, and they call their tyranny divine order. A hundred years ago, they branded the demon race "irredeemable" and answered a border skirmish with a Purge, burning demon villages to cinders in the name of righteousness. Kevian, now Demon King of the Ashen Reach, was a boy hiding in the rubble when it happened. He has hated Heaven with a clean, uncomplicated hatred ever since.Then his spymaster brings him a strange report: one goddess broke ranks. While the Pantheon let a mortal province starve rather than "spoil" humanity with unearned mercy, the youngest goddess in the Spire crossed the sky in secret and healed the dying anyway, and was dragged before the other gods and punished for it. Her name is Gaia, Goddess of Mercy and the Quiet Dawn, and the Pantheon treats her like an embarrassment: too soft, too soft-hearted, too much of a liability to be loved and too useful to be discarded.Kevian sees an opportunity, not a person. If the gods truly despise her, then stealing her costs them nothing they'll admit to caring about and everything they can't afford to lose. He takes her from her own shrine in the dead of night, intending to use her as a blade against the Pantheon: a hostage to lure the proud and the foolish among the gods down from their Spire, one at a time, where they can be killed.He does not expect her to be kind to his people. He does not expect her to heal his soldiers without being asked, to learn his sister's name, to look at a demon king covered in soot and old grief and see something other than a monster. Kevian tells himself none of it matters, that she is a weapon, a hostage, a means to an end. But somewhere between the first god who comes for her and the second, he notices that the Obsidian Keep feels less like a fortress and more like a home, and that Gaia has become, quietly and without his permission, the best part of his day.