Her touch takes. Her heart refuses to.

Corvina Vale—Cora to the few who dare—didn’t ask to be a Siphon. One brush of skin and life drains away, leaving behind a Chorus of stolen voices that never lets her sleep. When a perfect obsidian scroll bleeds starlight onto her floor, it names a place out of myth: the Somnus Equinox, a tournament held within the Obsidian Orrery, where worlds turn on silent clockwork and prisoners wear crowns.

The prize? The Keystone of Genesis—power enough to rewrite a single truth. Enough to heal the wasting sickness that is killing Cora’s sister.

Inside the Orrery, Cora faces trials that carve straight into the soul: the Garden of Whispers that feeds on your gentlest lies, the Cascade of Time that age-burns you to dust. To survive, she must do the unthinkable—turn her curse into a weapon. The Orrery takes note. So does Silas, the bound arbiter whose sorrow hums like a star at collapse, and Alistair, a pure-blood wizard who would rather shatter the game than lose to a “parasite.”

Alliances are a liability. Loneliness is a blade. And somewhere between a warden’s offered pact and a rival’s righteous fury, Cora discovers a terrible, liberating truth: the void inside her is not emptiness—it is hunger. What she chooses to feed it will decide who lives, who is damned, and whether a monster can win a miracle without becoming the very curse she fears.