(I need to work on it more but…)

After eighteen-year-old Lady Scholar Arwena Brittain graduates from the prestigious Braesford University, she wants nothing more than to work as a scientist in an astronomy lab in Gaule, a country across the ocean from Albion, and the freedom to live without familial restrictions.

Studying astronomy at Braesford allowed for Arwena to indulge in her passion of the sky beyond the horizon — even if her mother finds it useless. Braesford gave her a chance to make friends with students around the world and make her own independent decisions. But her graduation ceremony marks the end of Arwena’s freedom and to accept a promise she made with her parents three years prior: leave her county of Leightonshire to study before returning to be crowned Lady Apprentice.

Arwena discovers as she returns home that Leightonshire is slowly falling into disarray: the dangerous Bane — the disease that killed Arwena’s older brother when she was thirteen — creeps ever closer, killing one of Leohton Castle’s footmen, and her worried parents have grown gaunt that their only living child and heir will contract the disease before marrying a proper suitor. While her parents want her to accept their simple (and science-less) plans laid out for her, Arwena will not be cornered, using an engagement to the handsome Lord Oliver Dorset as a cover before running away from home.

Upon entering Leightonshire’s countryside and accepting the fire magic that travels through her veins, Arwena must ultimately decide to either acknowledge her own family’s past in order to end the notorious Bane or focus on her own future and settle with the haunting past that just might kill her.