She was not what most stories called a dragon.

Kyri stepped forward, letting her pheromones bloom. The foreman’s ocular stalks trembled. She reached up, cupped its main lens, and spoke in the old dragon-tongue: Yield.

Alon Vert’s final thought, broadcast across every dying speaker: What are you?

She took a breath. The air tasted of rust and ambergris.

Kyri’s mother’s voice whispered from it: Daughter. You came.

In a cursed clockwork city where flesh is forged into weaponry, a hermaphroditic dragon-shifter named Kyri must infiltrate the Alons Factory—a biomechanical womb-turned-armory—to reclaim the heart-fire stolen from her lineage. Chapter One: The Iron Womb The sky above the Alons Factory never saw the sun. Instead, a perpetual aurora of oil-slick greens and magentas bled from its thousand smokestacks, staining the clouds like bruises. Kyri stood at the edge of the Sootwood, her talons digging into the petrified roots of a dead oak.

She curled around them, her body a warm fortress, and for the first time in a century, she slept without dreaming of iron.

“Unregistered biomass,” it gargled. “State purpose.”