Book excerpt: As the fires of civil war are extinguished, the Guilds of Carcanas are left to question who was pulling the strings, and who among them had been feeding information to Celestial Rim. Zed Fifer has some answers, but they force Crios to question everything he knew about his past. With these deeper secrets of his father's work looming over him, the time has come for Crios to confront Axis. But in order to do so, he's going to need help from his friends in Dragon's Den and beyond. Time waits for no one, and by the end of it, Crios will come to understand what is at stake runs deeper than just Carcanas' independence from Axis' rule.