Nova, a brilliant Native American teen engineer and apprentice lightsmith on the war‑scarred world of Asterion, must turn panic into purpose and people into power to keep her besieged glass‑walled city and its dying Veil alive—while raids, a dragon‑blooded queen, a corrupted Council, and a rising Shadow that slips through rivers, relays, and frightened hearts all stand in the way of the light only she can awaken.

SYNOPSIS:

On the war-scarred world of Asterion, the last great refuge of survivors from a shattered cosmos, civilization survives beneath luminous domes and a planet‑wide energy barrier known as the Veil. For centuries, the Veil has kept the sentient Shadow at bay—an evolving, parasitic force born from the ruined planet Astasis. But the Veil is failing.

At the center of the city stands Nova, a gifted but uncertain “lightsmith”—a young light‑engineer trained to maintain Asterion’s forges, engines, and protective latticework. Nova has always believed the Houses and the Grand Council would keep their world safe if she simply did her part. That belief begins to fracture when she discovers that the same light she uses to power machines can heal soil, awaken dormant war machines, and alter the Veil itself. Her power is rare, unstable—and terrifying to the regime that trained her.

Nova’s closest ally is Kai, her brother-in-arms in the war company. During a devastating raid on Asterion’s power core by the Shadow‑aligned cult known as the Forsworn, Kai is forced to sacrifice his arm to stop a catastrophic breach. He is rebuilt with a forged prosthetic of living light and lattice, turning him into something between soldier and conduit—linked not only to the war machines he pilots but to the Veil’s pulse itself. As Kai struggles with trauma, survivor’s guilt, and his frightening new connection to Asterion’s infrastructure, his loyalty to Nova becomes both his anchor and his vulnerability.

Nova’s training is taken beyond the safety of the city by Elira, a seer of the Veil whose illumination reveals truth at a personal cost. Elira is quietly building a new vanguard—the War Artisans—who blend combat, engineering, and spiritual discipline to shape light, flame, and steel into living defenses. Under Elira’s mentorship in the dangerous Wanderlands, Nova learns that the Veil is not just a shield above the city; it is a living circuit that breathes through people, machines, and beasts. Every surge and falter of the Veil is mirrored in Nova’s own pulse.

Their fragile equilibrium is shattered by the arrival of Solan, a mysterious wanderer who literally falls from the sky—one eye sky‑blue, one molten gold—bound to a colossal astral owl spirit and haunted by missing time. Presented to the Grand Council as a valuable survivor and reconnaissance specialist, Solan is quietly placed in charge of reconstruction and survey. In truth, he is the Shadowbinder: a seeded architect of Astasis, infiltrating Asterion’s systems and politics on behalf of a planetary shadow‑intelligence that seeks to remake the city from within.

While Nova and Kai train on the ground and under the domes, the city’s governing body fractures. Several powerful House Regents and key Council members—secretly transformed into Voidborn, living conduits of Shadow—begin to sabotage infrastructure, seed panic, and weaponize shortages of light, water, and food. The once‑stable “Age of Quiet” collapses into rolling crises: power failures, poisoned rivers, mutated wildlife at the walls, and coordinated raids that seem perfectly tuned to Asterion’s blind spots.

Outside the domes, Orikk, a Highland Shadowbane tethered to his celestial wolf‑beast Eclipse, witnesses Solan pouring distilled Shadow into the Wanderland River. The corruption spreads explosively—twisting beasts, warping spirit animals, and turning the land itself into a carrier. Orikk rides through storms and near‑death to reach Asterion, arriving half‑contaminated, half‑heroic, with a single message: the Shadow is no longer at the city’s edge—it is inside its water, its walls, and its leadership.

As evidence mounts, a schism forms within the ruling class. A handful of uncorrupted Councilors, led in practice by General Ava, commander of the Nighthawks and Special Operations, and backed by Elira, Orikk, and the War Artisans, quietly suspend the compromised Regents and move to govern under emergency protocol. They must keep the Veil powered, keep civilians warm and fed, and hold streets against an enemy that can infect both flesh and infrastructure—without destroying public trust or collapsing into martial rule.

The conflict escalates on three interlocking fronts:

• Physical: Shadow-born creatures, corrupted citizens, and Forsworn cells assault districts and critical relays while Asterion’s SymbioTrons, Bastion Walkers, Nighthawks, and War Artisans fight to hold ground. In a pivotal sequence, Nova uses both aspects of her power—one hand that grows and heals, one hand that burns—to resurrect and then destroy war machines on a live field, turning the training grounds into a proving crucible for her dual nature.
• Political: Within the Grand Council and the Houses, Solan’s quiet manipulations and the Voidborn’s sabotage turn policy, logistics, and even religious doctrine into weapons. The unshadowed Councilors must rewrite governance protocols in real time, redefining “protection” as active participation: routing lantern lines, ember‑carts, and community shelters through the Veil’s listening grid while narrowing its surveillance to preserve civil trust.
• Spiritual / Metaphysical: Nova, Kai, Elira, Orikk, and even Eclipse gradually understand that the Veil is not a static barrier but a shared, conscious ecosystem. It is fed by fear as much as by courage, and the Shadow can exploit either. Power itself—light, energy, lineage, and memory—must be redefined if Asterion is to survive. The question becomes not only how to repel the Shadow, but how to reshape the relationship between light and darkness without repeating the hubris that destroyed the constellations before.

As the Seventh Ascent, a once‑celebratory planetary festival, approaches, Solan accelerates his plan: seeding ancient wormholes, awakening lost armies, and pushing the Veil toward failure so that Astasis can claim Asterion outright. With the city dimming—whole wards going dark to keep the barrier alive—Nova climbs a relay tower and literally takes half the city’s power through her body to keep the Veil breathing. Kai’s forged arm becomes a node in the same network; Orikk’s corrupted tether becomes both warning and weapon; Elira’s War Artisans become the only force capable of rebuilding and defending simultaneously.

In Awakening Light, the first book in a planned saga, Asterion teeters on the edge of planetary submission. Our heroes must decide whether to cling to brittle hierarchies and familiar tools of war, or to risk rewiring the very system that defines their world. If they fail, the last refuge in the stars becomes another dead, shadow‑crowned planet. If they succeed, they will not simply have saved Asterion—they will have reinvented what it means to wield light in a universe that no longer fears the dark.

THE LIGHTSMITH OF ASTERION