Spoiler Warning
Evening, readers.
Fair warning first. This is a full recap of When the Moon Hatched, by Sarah A. Parker, and it spoils everything, the ending included. If you have not read it, come back after. If book two is on your shelf and the first has gone fuzzy, stay.
Here is the short answer. Raeve is an assassin who passes as a null, hunting the bounty hunter who killed her friend. She is caught, sentenced to dragons, and carried off by a king named Kaan Vaegor, who says she is someone he lost. Her memory has holes, and the last chapters turn on a diary.
There is a short spice note near the end, with chapter numbers counted from the text. Book two only gets its publisher blurb, because I have not read it. Let’s begin.
The World In One Minute
Five Creators made this world. Caelis of Aether, Bulder of Ground, Rayne of Water, Clode of Air and Ignos of Fire. Dragons are their pride, and when dragons die they curl up in the sky and turn to stone. Those stones are the moons.
The globe has three bands. The Burn in the north is hot and always sunny. The Fade in the middle lives in permanent golden hour. The Shade in the south has no sun, only aurora ribbons and moonlight. Each band has its own dragons, Sabersythes, Moltenmaws and Moonplumes, and its own king. The three kings are brothers.
The prologue explains the trouble. Moons started falling, and the Creators blamed Caelis, so they locked him inside a black Aether Stone, set in a diadem worn by one royal family in the Shade. Then, after a very long peace, another moon falls.
Meet Raeve, The Fake Null
Meet Raeve. She is an Elding Blade, an assassin for the Fiur du Ath, rebels fighting the Fade’s crown. She passes as a null, with a clipped ear, but she can hear Clode, the air goddess, without her iron ring. In chapter one she poses as a bard in the Hungry Hollow club, singing to lure a man named Tarik Relaken.
By chapter three she has killed him, for the way he ran a fighting pit for children. A stranger in a dark cloak watched her sing, and he finds her afterward. Her home is shared with Essi, the young friend she rescued from the Undercity.
Then her boss Sereme warns that a bounty hunter named Rekk Zharos is in the city, and orders her to lie low. But Essi goes down to the Undercity herself. Essi is stabbed, and she dies in Raeve’s arms. From that moment Raeve has one goal, and it is Rekk.
The Diary Of Elluin
The book is built from voices. Most chapters are Raeve, a few are Kaan, a few are his sister Veya, and one is Rekk. The Other, a second presence inside Raeve, speaks in third person. The diary entries are Elluin, princess of the Shade.
As a child she sneaks into her brother Haedeon’s sleigh to steal a Moonplume egg of her own. He is crippled on the ice. She fights off a pack of doomquills, and a huge wild Moonplume joins in. She calms it with a song and gets him home.
At eighteen she finds her parents and Haedeon dead on their pallets, poisoned. She is left wearing her mother’s diadem, the Aether Stone, which drains her. The Tri-Council picks Tyroth Vaegor as her future bound, and she is taken to the Burn.
Her dragon Slatra follows across the plains until the sun has burned and blinded her. Then a scarred rider on a huge Sabersythe finds her in the hutch, beside her ruined dragon. His eyes look like embers. Remember him.
Prison, Trial, Dragon
Back in the present, Raeve hunts in the Undercity, and the savage Other takes over. Rekk shoots her with an iron pellet. She bites off the tip of his finger, and he knocks her out. She wakes in iron, with a pin in her shoulder, and he whips her back.
She is prisoner seventy-three, in a cell beside a woetoe named Wrook, waiting for the Guild of Nobles. At her trial she is sentenced to the dragons, by one vote. The deciding hand belongs to a hooded man in Runi white, the same stranger from the club.
That night he unlocks her cell, brings a healer named Bhea to mend her back, and holds her hands. At dawn Raeve is tied to a stake in the coliseum. She sings in a language she does not know, and a Sabersythe closes its jaws around her, then flies away. The rider is Kaan, King of the Burn.
The King Of The Burn
Kaan Vaegor keeps her bound, calls her Moonbeam, and pulls the pin from her shoulder himself. She escapes in a storm, and a flooded gorge sweeps her away. Clan warriors pull her out, and a silver Fate Herder drives her toward them. They call her Kholu, foretold to bear a child who will tether the moons.
In the Johkull clan’s crater, two warriors fight to the death for the right to bind with her. She refuses the winner, Hock, and fights him herself. Kaan drops into the crater on his dragon, offers her his pendant, and kills Hock after she marks his back with her hand.
He carries her to Dhomm, where a Runi named Agni heals her skull. Then he shows her a cavern holding the fossilized Moonplume Slatra, pieced together shard by shard. He believes Raeve is Elluin. She says no. But in a jungle house, a vision hits her, and she realizes the place is not someone else’s love story. It is hers.
The Great Flurrt
Raeve is not ready. She plans to pay a Mindweft, a rare mind reader, to wipe Kaan out of her head. The diary shows why that hurts. Elluin and Kaan fell in love, and he gave her a carved pendant called a malmr.
But his father, King Ostern, forced her into a binding with Tyroth, and she was already pregnant. Then comes the Great Flurrt, a festival while the dragons fly. At a masked ball under a dome of ice pillars, Raeve wins big at Skripi, a card game, and then beats Kaan for a wager.
They dance. On top of a pillar she says she is not the woman he lost, and he says he finds no joy in pretending. They kiss. Next morning he says he loves her, and that someone out there needs her. He makes her promise to hear the truth. She agrees, and Rekk arrives in Dhomm.
Rekk Meets The Other
Rekk rides in on a Moonplume named Liri, blistered by the sun, with a white flag. Raeve, who seems to know that pain, helps heal her wing. Raeve promises not to kill Rekk on Burn soil. Then Kaan lets Raeve go.
Kaan’s guards watch Rekk in Dhomm for a few days, then he sets out for Bothaim, the neutral city, hunting the missing princess Kyzari. Raeve gets there first. She walks in cloaked, poses as the woman he ordered for the night, stabs him with an iron pin, and ties him to a bed. Then The Other, the savage second voice in her head, takes over.
She burns him with a poker, and says she will show him exactly how Liri felt. The chapter ends with his face in flames. Raeve is silent inside, and it is The Other who does it.
The Diary Reveal
Late in the book, Veya goes to Arithia to find Elluin’s diary. She disguises herself as a maid named Ayda, and meets King Tyroth. He threatens her head, and tears the wings off a message lark that looks blank. It was not blank. Kaan and Veya write in invisible ink that only dragonflame reveals.
She finds Elluin’s diary in a hollow behind the bed, with a view of Haedeon’s moon. In the last entries, Elluin is dying, drained by the stone. She pretended the baby was Tyroth’s. The baby, Kyzari, was Kaan’s, and Tyroth raised her as his own.
The epilogue jumps to the Scavenger King, Arkyn, who holds Kyzari in a cell, and who is a half-brother nobody knew about. He wants the bronze throne of the Burn. The last image is a tiny, damaged lark flying to her cell with three letters.
Who Is Related To Whom
Here is the web. Elluin loved Kaan and bore his daughter, Kyzari. Tyroth bound with Elluin and raised Kyzari as his own. Cadok is Tyroth’s twin and king of the Fade. Veya is their sister. Arkyn is the secret half-brother. Raeve sits in the middle, with visions of Elluin’s life and a grudge against Rekk.
Two things stay open. Kaan believes Raeve is Elluin, and she half agrees, but she dreams of being a child called Fire Lark in the Scavenger King’s pits. And the epilogue says Kyzari looks very like that Fire Lark. The book never says how those fit together.
Spice Level And Content Notes
Now the spice note. Everything here is a count from the text, and the rating at the end is my opinion. The book opens with its own warnings: blood and gore, death and violence, sexually explicit scenes, torture, an implied threat of sexual assault, explicit language, and cruelty to a creature.
I count six chapters with sex or self touch on the page: thirty-five, fifty-nine, sixty-nine, seventy-eight, eighty and eighty-seven. Only seventy-eight goes all the way. Thirty-five is hands only. Fifty-nine is a short memory, and sixty-nine a dream cut off by a dragon’s roar. Eighty is Raeve alone while Kaan watches. Eighty-seven is the villain being crude, ending in an ambush.
Heavy content is spread wider. Chapter three has a graphic killing, seventeen a whipping, and forty and forty-three beheadings. Forty-four is a dragon burned and blinded, eighty-two a child burned in a dream, eighty-three a blistered dragon, and eighty-eight torture with a hot poker.
My draft rating is four out of five chilies for heat, because four of the six chapters are explicit in their wording. It is also four out of five for violence, with torture and beheadings. Both are my opinion.
Book Two And The Verdict
The Ballad of Falling Dragons is out now, and it is book two of the Moonfall series. The official blurb says Raeve is driven by vengeance and torn between her love for Kaan and a past she has not faced. A catastrophic moonfall is coming, alliances shift, and a hidden truth may change everything.
I have not read book two, so that blurb is all I will say about it. What you carry in is simple. Veya now knows Kyzari’s secret, Kyzari is in a cell, and the book does not say whether Kaan knows he has a daughter.
If this helped, subscribe, tap like, and tell me below: did you guess the diary’s secret before the end?
