Tending the Moss-Drake Nursery
A Novel of Small Scales

About this book:

In the frost-cracked glasshouse of a forgotten estate, disgraced beast-keeper Silas Croft guards six eggs no larger than sand grains—the last moss-drakes south of the Spire Mountains. Once master of the Imperial Menagerie's vaulted arks, Silas now wields a shattered loupe, a jury-rigged bell jar, and a fermenting bed of apples and manure against a killing freeze. But the cold is only the first enemy. Inspector Vane of the Agricultural Commission has come to enforce a new law that criminalizes Silas's very breath, and a scavenger with a crowbar prowls the night for lead and brass—unaware that forcing the wrong door will shatter the fragile heat keeping microscopic dragons alive.

At this scale, a heartbeat is a seismic event. A single mold spore is an invading army. The difference between hatching and extinction turns on the width of a needle's tip, the dust of a rare red moss, the steadiness of hands that once fed wyverns from silver spoons. *Tending the Moss-Drake Nursery* is a novel of exquisite precision and quiet ferocity, where the fate of a species rests on one man's refusal to let the dark go unchallenged. For readers who love the tactile wonder of *The Goblin Emperor* and the microscopic stakes of *The Microscope*, here is a story that proves the smallest scales can hold the largest courage.

When the rime advances and the Commission returns with constables, Silas will need more than ingenuity. He'll need the impossible: a second clutch, a hidden valley, and the truth about what the moss-drakes become when they grow. The glass is skimming over with ice. The embryos are stirring. And something is waiting in the amber.