Gilded cage

For a thousand years, the three great Houses have ruled under the same truth: the spirits left humanity with gifts to protect the balance of the world. Power, inherited and controlled. Solène Caelindra was born into the brightest of them. A princess raised in gold and expectation, she has spent her life fighting to prove she is more than a symbol in her father’s court. But her gift is not like the others. It does not shape what already exists. It creates. And every time she uses it, it burns her from the inside out. When a diplomatic mission turns into something far more dangerous, Solène is forced beyond the borders of everything she knows—into uneasy alliance with Erevan Terrath, an heir carrying a power just as lethal as her own. Across forests, deserts, and the shifting edges of a world that feels increasingly wrong, the truths they were raised on begin to fracture. Because something about the balance is breaking. And the closer they get to the heart of it, the clearer it becomes