This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

The morning mist clung to the ancient cobblestones of Elderbrook like the breath of sleeping dragons, and Lyra Thornwick had always imagined it was exactly that. At seventeen, she possessed the kind of wild imagination that her grandmother Meredith both encouraged and worried about in equal measure. Today, however, as Lyra made her way through the village square with a basket of freshly baked bread for the morning deliveries, she had no idea that her fanciful thoughts about dragons and magic were about to become her reality.

The village of Elderbrook sat nestled in a valley between two great mountain ranges, the Whispering Peaks to the north and the Shadowmere Mountains to the south. For three centuries, it had remained a peaceful farming community, its people content to grow their crops, tend their livestock, and live simple lives far removed from the troubles of the outside world. The old stories spoke of a time when magic flowed through these lands like rivers of starlight, when great kingdoms rose and fell by the power of crystal sorcery, but those were just tales told by firelight to wide-eyed children.

Lyra had always felt different from the other young people in Elderbrook. While they dreamed of marriages and crops and the predictable rhythm of village life, she found herself drawn to the ancient ruins that dotted the mountainsides, to the strange symbols carved into the oldest stones of the village well, and to the peculiar way the light seemed to dance differently around certain objects when she wasn't looking directly at them. Her grandmother had always said she had "the sight," but Meredith had never explained exactly what that meant.