In the peaceful village of Dreamville, twelve-year-old Kysh dreams not of being a celebrated hero, but of joining the Lumina Institute as an engineer-building tools and structures that keep people safe. But on her birthday, the very thing she never wanted appears: the Verdant Sigil, marking her as a Kryphyn-one of the rare gifted ones the realm reveres... and the Institute seizes by force. Taken from her family in the dead of night, dragged away to the towering, gleaming halls of Lumina, Kysh discovers that the noble order everyone praises hides a dark truth. Her father fled this place years ago; the guards who captured her were once children just like her; and the "special power" she bears is something they call dangerous. Among nine other stolen children in Batch 241, each marked with a unique Sigil, Kysh must learn to master her gift-not to fight for the Institute, but to find her way back home, uncover the secrets her parents kept, and decide for herself what it truly means to protect the ones you love.

Ten years ago, Serene was sent away to a distant place to heal, leaving Mourndale behind. Now she returns, but the town she knew is gone-replaced by a quiet, unsettling shadow where people wear familiar faces yet feel strangely wrong, and the night hides horrors that bleed black. Haunted by fragmented memories and visions of a girl she cannot place, Serene is drawn into a dangerous truth she was never meant to uncover. With the help of a mysterious investigator she once considered an enemy, she follows a trail of secrets left hidden within her own home, revealing that she was never meant to come back. As ancient powers awaken and a forgotten bond calls out to her, Serene slowly realizes that her return was not an accident... and that the one controlling the darkness is the very last person she would ever dare to suspect.