Dalon is a storyteller, Karí is a daydreamer. Armed with a mind-reading amulet, they try to craft the best folktale retelling their village has ever heard.

There aren't many ways to fatten a purse in the sleepy fishing village of Lurit. Dalon peddles smoked fish by day and stories by night. He works with Karí — a girl struggling to find her place within her potter family — using an amulet called the King's Eyes to watch her mind. With Dalon's easy way with words and Karí's vivid imagination, their stories soon develop a small but loyal audience.

When Dalon finds himself on the verge of indentured servitude, he sees the arrival of a trading caravan as an opportunity to pay his debts. On a tight deadline, Dalon and Karí juggle the preparation of their next story with daytime chores and family interference, all the while trying to keep their illegal use of the King's Eyes a secret.

In a bustling settlement with blood-sucking shapeshifters and sentient machines, some folks are not what they seem to be.

Yaya is a highly-advanced humanoid machine, trying to earn the final credential that will make her the guardian of her creator's orphaned daughter. Eager to prove herself, she takes on an assignment to determine whether a peddler in her village is an aswang — a sinister creature that disguises itself as a human and drinks human blood.

It's a difficult assignment for Yaya. Her potential failure spells out multiple outcomes, all of which are disastrous: losing all the credentials she's already earned, condemning an innocent person to a painful ritual, or allowing a dangerous creature to roam freely. And those are not the worst of it. She soon learns that the motive behind her new assignment is darker than she ever thought.

A mishap with forbidden magic separates Sano from his mother, and his only chance of reuniting with her lies in magic older and stranger than anything he's ever known.

Sixteen-year-old Sano was only trying to save a village from a landslide, but the illegal magic he used catches the attention of powerful warriors. Chased out of his isolated home in the tropical forests, Sano ventures into a kingdom he barely knows. The only help he can get comes from a reluctant companion, Anina, who seeks the secret to gaining magic — a secret that his mother might be keeping. Together, they must find a way to reunite with Sano's mother while evading warriors, thieves, and scammers.

But it's a dangerous time to be a fugitive in the Kingdom of Dayung. Still reeling from a recent rebellion, the people of the kingdom are slow to trust and quick to conspire. The greedy, ruthless king is desperate to eliminate any threats to his power. And to top it all, a mysterious wind is plaguing the kingdom, turning people into wood.