Before She Ignites

Mira is the Hopebearer of the Fallen Isles, the public symbol of hope, expected to look perfect and beautiful at all times. In truth she has been a political pawn for the council she serves. When she uncovers a conspiracy that threatens the realm's dragons, that same council betrays her and sentences her to a brutal island prison.

The prison is called the Pit, and it is among the deadliest places in the Fallen Isles. Mira decides she is finished being used. She has to forge unlikely alliances to stay alive while she searches for the truth behind her sentence.

Guards and fellow prisoners are not the only danger. Mira also lives with anxiety and panic attacks, and the book treats her mental illness as a daily part of the fight to survive, set inside a high-fantasy world. The fate of the Fallen Isles' last dragons rests on her. Her best chance may lie in an endangered kind of magic she never knew she had.

This is political fantasy, the first book in a trilogy, built on betrayal, prison survival and dragons. The tone is dark and tense, with Mira's own courage and doubt driving the pace as the truth about her magic closes in.