HERA was born unable to ignite the Sacred Ring of divine power. Her father, Dragon Emperor NOAH, regarded her as a disgrace to the royal house. He told the world she had long since died of illness, and had her locked away in a desolate, freezing side courtyard to eke out her existence.
It was there that a boy named OWEN came over the wall. He taught her to fight — fists, stance, the whole art of combat — and became the only glimmer of light in her years of misery. Then he rode off to war, and she never heard from him again.
At eighteen, HERA was heartlessly abandoned on the perilous Sacred Mountain, left for the beasts and the wasteland to devour. She survived against all odds — and there she encountered the lingering soul of a White Dragon ancestor, and learned a secret that shattered everything she believed: the fact that the Sacred Ring would not light was itself proof that Athena had chosen her as successor. Bearing wounds no one could see, she wanted no part of a power that belonged to the people who had betrayed her.
But disaster was already fermenting across the water. SILAS, the Black Dragon Emperor, was draining the vital essence of the young to cling to his fading life, and had torn up a thousand-year-old covenant to launch a full-scale invasion. Where will HERA go from here?
