REIGN OF THE PALE TIDE

Long before she died at his hand, Sereia Pelagos was the white-scale princess of the deep — pale, luminous, and pitied by a court that hoarded gold scales like proof of worth. When her coming-of-age vow ended in her lover Kael Stormbright's public refusal and a blade between the ribs, the last thing she saw was her stepsister Liora smiling. She wakes at the beginning of that same day. Reborn one heartbeat before her ruin, Sereia moves through a kingdom that still believes she is fragile. She lets them. In the salt-black underworld she buys Nerio Glasswake — a translucent merman the whole market spat on — and claims him as her husband before every mouth that has ever laughed at her. Piece by piece, she turns every trap Liora sets against its architect, drags her father the King into the crimes of her first life, and stirs the dragon lineage sleeping beneath her pale scales. By the time the gold-scale court kneels, an older, hungrier thing wakes in the abyss below — and the reborn tide comes with a crown.