Update: Tuesday and Thursday The crown brings no peace. Only ruin. Diana, Katherine, and Sophie were never meant for greatness. Nobody bothered to tell them that, either way. One moment they had ordinary lives - missed deadlines, cluttered apartments, the comfortable smallness of a world that asked nothing of them. The next, they wake as Guardians: sentient weapons bound to warrior animal spirits, dropped into a mirror-world fracturing under the weight of its own lies. Tefstalia claimed them the way a debt comes due. There was no warning. There was no choice. Power, they learn quickly, is never a gift. And the price is never the one you were expecting to pay. Every Guardian is assigned a Keeper - a warrior bound by oath, tethered to her by something that moves beneath the skin like a second heartbeat, something that makes it increasingly difficult to know where duty ends and want begins. Ryen, a count stripped of his standing, who treats every silence as a sentence and every omission as a wound left open. Pyter, a marquess whose devotion is more dangerous than his cruelty. And then there is the Prince of Lafyen - the variable no one accounted for, the son of a king who has made it his life's work to destroy every last Protector. When the mage Alayna claims them, neutrality stops being an option. What follows will give them access to Tefstalia's oldest and most buried secrets - and test whether they can do what almost no one has managed before: hold the line between obedience and will without losing themselves on either side. Three bonds, they are told, is a blessing. Three bonds, they are not told, is a sentence with no appeal.