Primeborne

When children of eighteen break their birth-seals, they're supposed to call forth shining, powerful demons-status, strength, and a future in one ritual.

Seren Amasi gets a half-dead one.

Wounded, mocked, and written off as a failure, Seren's bond to the quiet storm-demon Vaelith makes her the joke of her generation. But when an old scar in the land-the vast Crater outside the city of Harmon-begins to hum and pull the world toward disaster, the girl nobody took seriously is the only one who can hear what the crack is saying.

Dragged into politics between two cities, roped into fragile experiments with demon power, and forced to work beside the scholar whose forbidden diagrams nearly broke the world once already, Seren becomes an anchor: the human who can stand in a scar and tell it enough.

With Vaelith at her side-part gentle tease, part ancient storm-Seren helps hammer together a messy new Accord between humans and demons: listening posts in schools, humming games for children, cooperation trials instead of secret weapons. But every step toward something better is watched by someone else.

Far downstream, Lin Ya, a brilliant and ruthless former apprentice, is stealing old axis designs and rewriting them in doors, wells, and walls. She wants what Seren touched in the Crater-and she wants to prove she can finish what the old generation never dared.

As school doors start to scream, wells learn the wrong songs, and a taunting catch me appears carved into the Crater itself, Seren and Vaelith gamble everything on a dangerous trap: a false axis, a fake world-breaking pattern meant to lure Lin Ya into revealing herself.

Book One ends with the net holding-barely. The cities survive. The scars quiet. Seren proves she can stop before the edge, and the Accord walks away with a single, priceless gain: a direction.

Lin Ya is real. She's listening.
And now they know exactly which river city she's hiding in.