To save her dying world, she sold her blood to a monster. But the true monsters live in the sky. In the ash-choked slums of Fallow’s End, life is a crime punishable by death. Fenna is a Thorn-Weaver, a rare human cursed with the ability to bloom vibrant roses from barren dirt—using her own blood as the price. Desperate to save her starving people, she makes a deadly bargain with the one creature the world fears more than starvation: The Rust King. Varek is a nightmare forged of decaying metal and madness. Afflicted by the Blood-Rust Blight, his flesh is slowly turning into jagged iron, and his sanity is slipping into the dark. In exchange for fertile soil for her village, Fenna offers herself as his willing captive, using her life-giving magic to hold back his fatal curse. Locked inside his brutal, iron-wrought fortress, Fenna expects a monster. Instead, she finds a fiercely protective king fighting a war on two fronts. The intense, forced proximity inside his cage of rust ignites a dangerous, slow-burn tension between them—one that could either save them or burn them both to ash. But the true enemy watches from above. The Ivory Ascendancy, a cult of so-called holy clerics, are hoarding the world’s life-force inside their pristine, glass-domed paradise. To break Varek’s curse and save the earth, they must attempt the impossible: infiltrate the sanctuary of the gods and shatter it from the inside out. He is a king made of lethal iron. She is a girl who bleeds roses. Together, they are going to tear the sky apart.