Night of Starless Skies opens at the edge of an erasure.
The paladins have done their work thoroughly. Of the witches, only a few are left, scattered and marked for ending. Their names have been stripped from public memory. Their bodies left as lessons. Their language extracted like a bad tooth. The world went quiet the way a room goes quiet after a door closes on something no one will speak of again.
Lydia is one of the last.
Her sisters are gone. So is the world that understood what she was. What keeps her moving is not hope. Hope has too soft a shape for what she carries. Mara, her lover, has been cast into the Glitter Dream by the Jovial Elves’ tocsin: a place where the body is kept like a fire banked low, still breathing, still warm, while the mind sinks too deep for any voice to reach, too far in to find its way back.
To reach her, Lydia must find three fairies, each unlike the other, and extract the blood from the veins of their wings.
Crafted into an elixir, their blood becomes a hand reaching into the Glitter Dream itself, searching for the place where Mara still breathes. Lydia no longer believes there is a clean way to do what must be done. What she has counted and recounted in the dark adds up to one thing: Mara, still breathing somewhere beyond reach, still alive enough to be saved, still hers enough to ruin herself for.
Lydia is hollowed by grief the way a long winter hollows a field. Everything living stripped back until only the cold, bare ground remains. What remains has hardened into something else. What she carries is still love the way a scar is still skin: recognizable, but changed past softness, past warmth. It has been too long in the cold to be anything else now.
What is someone willing to become when love is the only thing they have left?