Ruby Flint and the Wing Above Stonecliff is Book Two of the Ruby Flint series, following Ruby's continuing journey as the guardian of an ancient power that transforms her into a creature of prehistoric strength and wonder.
Months after resealing the First Nest, Ruby wants nothing more than an uneventful term - school, a fragile truce with her former rival Mia Calder, and one weekend that doesn't end in danger. But Stonecliff Bay has other plans. Strange winds batter the headland. Birds abandon roosts they've used for decades. And Arthur's compass, which has pointed steadily at Ruby for months, suddenly swings toward the old signal station on the cliffs - where a second relic, a wing scale, has begun to stir.
Ruby doesn't choose this power. It chooses her first, involuntarily, in a terrifying near-fall off Featherstone Point that leaves her shaken and afraid of her own body's response to fear. Unlike the strength and roar she has learned to control, Wing Form answers height, wind, and terror on its own terms - a danger that can come from inside an ordinary moment, not just from villains.
Those villains arrive anyway. Corin Ashe, a coastal surveyor with drones and an unreadable, genuinely kind streak, has come to Stonecliff Bay under a legitimate-seeming contract - but her real interest lies in the sealed chambers beneath the old signal station. As Ruby's family finally confronts the true scale of the threat they face - a decades-old, coastline-spanning organization far larger than the one man who once hunted the first relic - old wounds surface too, including her grandfather Arthur's guilt over a woman named Eleanor Tomlinson, a keeper he failed to protect thirty years before.
With her friend Leo Marsh's careful research and, eventually, Mia Calder's hard-won trust and her family's own hidden history, Ruby assembles a found-family team that investigates museum thefts, a relic-smuggling network run by a shadowy handler, and a rescue mission that nearly costs her best friend his life. Every step forces her to choose between the fast, solitary instincts that have always felt like strength, and the slower, harder work of trusting other people to help carry a fight too large for any one girl to win alone - even one who can fly.
That lesson comes to a head during a coastal storm, when a new, colder operative closes in to finish what Ashe could not. Guided by a vision of an ancient guardian who learned the same lesson at devastating cost, and grounded by a team that has proven itself again and again - a scientist with a stopwatch, a friend who once doubted her, a mother learning what protection actually looks like, and a grandfather trying to become a better man than he once was - Ruby faces the storm not by racing toward the biggest threat alone, but by circling back to the people who need her most.
The wing relic, it turns out, was never impressed by speed or solitude. It answers something else entirely: the choice, made over and over, to belong to something larger than yourself.
Ruby Flint and the Wing Above Stonecliff closes with real costs and real growth - an antagonist's redemption, a threat that escapes to fight another day, and a family and friendship stronger than when the book began - while opening a clear path toward Book Three, as an old fossil vault beneath the Stonecliff Museum begins, quietly, to stir.
About the Author :
E. M. Thomben is the pen name of an Australian author drawn to the crossroads of science, mystery, and adventure. With a background in technology and a lifelong love of storytelling, E. M. crafts tales where the boundaries of reality are always just a little bit blurred - blending humour, suspense, and wonder in equal measure.
E. M. toyed and dabbled for years with the idea of publishing the scribblings and notes that slowly evolved into these novels, until finally deciding to take the plunge a few years ago. What began as creative thought experiments and late-night notebook sessions has since turned into a slowly growing list of immersive, thought-provoking fiction.
Though E. M. prefers to remain behind the curtain, letting the stories speak for themselves, Thomben is a quiet observer of the universe - watching, wondering, and writing. Every tale E. M. tells is shaped by the encouragement of friends, the curiosity of family, and the infinite possibilities found in a single unanswered question.
