Azazel Wickerman, nineteen, is the last daughter of a dying house — short, sharp-tongued, famous mostly for falling down, and marked from birth by a Blood Seal that drinks her strength like a debt it's collecting.

When her Crownguard cell is deployed into the Bleached Forest to trace a spreading corruption, the mission leads them to a dead city, a stair nobody built, and a buried door with the name chiseled off it.

The deeper Azazel goes, the more the dark gets out of her way — and she's starting to suspect the thing in her arm knows why.