Lian Shuyue has spent her entire life being invisible.
Raised in a hidden mountain sanctuary, she has always known that the power inside her is dangerous - a fire that the gods themselves have declared forbidden. When that power finally wakes, she is forced to flee into the vast and dazzling Celestial Realms, disguised as a humble scholar of starlore, hoping to learn what she is before anyone else finds out.
What she doesn't expect is him.
Zhen Yanlong - Crown Prince of the Eastern Dragon Court, warrior, scholar, and the most accomplished celestial practitioner of his generation - is not supposed to notice her. She is supposed to be unremarkable. Careful. Small. But Yanlong has spent years quietly researching an anomaly in his own celestial power that he cannot explain, and when Shuyue walks into his seminar and dismantles a century of academic consensus in a single afternoon, he knows she is something he has never encountered before.
As master and student, they unravel a secret buried beneath three hundred years of divine politics: their souls are fragments of an ancient unity-flame - two celestial dragons who defied the gods at the dawn of the world and were divided as punishment. The gods believed separation would erase them. They were wrong.
Now the Celestial Mandate is closing in. An immortal tribunal has been convened. And Shuyue and Yanlong must choose: hide what they are and survive, or stand before the gods as what they have always been - and demand the right to remain whole.
Hearts of the Celestial Flame is a sweeping mythological romance steeped in the imagery of East Asian celestial fantasy - a story of dragonfire and starlight, of destiny wrestled back from the hands of gods, and of two souls who have been finding each other across lifetimes, and are finally, in this one, ready to stay.
