Wing Walker (The Swooning Moon Saga 1)
by MT FinnbergPublish: Jul 31, 2018FantasyBook Overview
After Alliance bombings, Planet Swooning Moon is in ruins. Only the megalopolis Capitol survived under its blue dome. A wild world awaits in the marshlands: among thousands of broken-down amusement parks, dragon catchers raid the air and gangs of youth, ‘wing walkers’, pace the marshlands looking for magical items to sell for a few coins.Eighteen-year-old Cassie just arrived. She ran away from home in tears, heartbroken after losing her best friend in a tragic accident. But on Swooning Moon, everybody knows dragons can alter reality. All she needs is a sage dragon’s magic…Right? The quest is the only thing she can think of in her sorrow. Some days, she fears she’s chasing an elusive dream. They say that fairies' fluttering can conjure up premonitions, and fallen hippogriff feathers make you invisible...Is that anything but stories to soothe your soul?
But dragons harbour powerful magic, and she’s seen first hand what it can do. More used to dragon-singing at her parents’ opera house, she doesn’t know her way around the unforgiving, cold wilderness, but finds an unexpected ally in Jay Tachebana, son of the most affluent mobster, who flies around in samurai attire in his father’s ‘ludicrously smooth’ billion-dollar racer craft catching dragons for rich buyers. For the first time, Cassie sees the cruelty behind the limelights she’s used to and has to come to terms with the sadder side of the life she knows. At the Opera, dragons are happy and well taken care of—is this really what it’s like behind the scenes? She always dreamt of founding an animal rescue center for mythological creatures with her friend. They would have taken in pegasi, unicorns, and hurt dragons, too, but what can she do alone feeling small, lonely, and hurt? What will become of all their dreams? The only thing keeping her from losing herself entirely is Jay’s patience. In search of the oldest dragons, they venture deep into uncharted grounds and discover there’s a good reason why Swooning Moon is encased in guard spells. They need to make the Alliance understand the crisis is real before it’s too late…because underneath the spells, something dark is awakening.
EXCERPT:
Cassie turned back to the dragons, trying to calm her mind. “Well. That’s awful treatment of sentient, intelligent animals who are acutely sensitive to the rights and wrongs of the universe.”“You don’t know that…” Jay let out a soft laugh. “They don’t like the wrongs of the universe? I mean, I get the part about them being intelligent, and I agree, we shouldn’t treat them bad, but not like they talk?”“They sort of do, if you connect.”
***
On her seventeenth birthday, Dad had walked a sage dragon onto the stage for her. Its beady eyes had already glowed with ether. She knew a few people had held their breaths. She had. The clack of the yard-long claws on the white marble floor still echoed in her mind. She had frozen still, stomach sinking, believing she could never sing with it.But it was doable. Even that was doable.
