Change hurts. Hurt changes. Seven years ago, the Frozen Flame brought magic to Earth—but not to Dalton, who received only scars. Now a lonely shut-in, “Ezzen” has resigned himself to an online life of secondhand magic, dabbling in magitech engineering and fanboying over the Spire and its superhuman Vaetna, the paragons of this new era. So when fate splinters and magic finds him, it’s the best day of his life—and the worst, as he suddenly becomes a resource in the cold war over control of magical power. From paramilitary organizations to Flame-worshipping cults to incandescent magical girls, the forces of the world sense the ripples and close in. Worse, his escape exposes the awful secret of the Flame, the thing quietly omitted from all the theory: that instead of the apotheosis he’s dreamt of, the reality of being a flamebearer is cruel and twisted, the bloody path of monsters. And some of those monsters are frighteningly similar to the Vaetna he idolizes.
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