On planet Meridya, the Aethians came from the sky like knives. Eleven-year-old Dreiton Rithnen watched his mother die on a sky-port tarmac, her blood on his hands, an obsidian dagger pressed into his grip — his father's dagger, the one he was never allowed to touch. The invasion was swift. The shields fell. The cities burned. And in the chaos, Dreiton was evacuated to Kadona, a space station millions of miles from home, with nothing but a dead mother's last words and a weapon he didn't understand. He trained. He fought. He became a Star Paladin. And then the Aethians came for him again — because the invasion of his world wasn't an attack. It was a retrieval mission. Captured and taken to Lorthos, the Aethian homeworld — a planet that is more machine than earth — Dreiton discovers that the invasion of his world wasn't random. The dagger his mother died pressing into his hands has a history. His father has a secret. And the Aethian queen who rules from a garden of impossible beauty has been waiting for him for seventeen years. She offers him a choice: accept conversion — let them replace his body with metal alloy, his eyes with analytical sight, his humanity with something new — or die. Dreiton chooses to live. But the conversion's true cost isn't the metal in his body. It's that he can no longer see a garden without data stripping it bare — and the duality that will follow him into every moment for the rest of his life. Now, to escape Lorthos, Dreiton must confront the queen who designed his destiny, shatter the hivemind that enforces it, and decide what remains of him when the conversion is complete. Some inheritances cut. This one transforms.