Nova is running out of time.

Three days. That's all she has before scale sickness reaches her heart a slow, suffocating illness that will consume her from the inside out if she doesn't stop it. The only way to stop it: bond with her dragon. But Nova has a secret she's kept from everyone, even her twin sister Luna. She has already found her dragon. A blue-gray dragon that had been waiting for her, patient and steady, since she was eight years old.

And she has been running from it ever since.

She felt it the first time she saw them something shifting in her chest like a compass needle that had been spinning uselessly for years and had just, without warning, found north. She looked away anyway.

Something is wrong a foreboding she can't shake, darkening with every passing hour, whispering that bonding means losing something she can never get back. Then a mysterious fire scorches the earth and reveals ancient ruins. Inside them: a leather scroll, crumbling at every edge but one, with only a single line still legible.

"For Nova and Luna, when both of you have bonded with your dragons."

The scroll holds the answers. Answers Nova desperately needs. But to unlock them, she must do the one thing she fears most.

The scale sickness is spreading. The foreboding is growing. And somewhere in the ruins, something ancient is waiting.

Bond or be lost to the dark forever.