Dreams of Gods & Monsters (daughter of Smoke & Bone, #3)

The third and final installment of the Daughter of Smoke & Bone trilogy opens on two fronts. On Earth, Eliza Jones, a 24-year-old doctoral fellow in evolutionary biology at the Smithsonian, wakes screaming from a recurring nightmare of a failing sky and devouring beasts, a dream so severe it required a pacemaker when she was seven. Her estranged family contacts her with a cryptic message to turn on the TV. In the parallel world of Eretz, where seraphim (winged, fire-blooded angels) and chimaera (hybrid beast-creatures of mixed animal and human aspect) have warred for centuries, a fragile rebellion takes shape.

A thousand seraphim appear over Uzbekistan and fly west to Vatican City, triggering global pandemonium. Their leader, Jael, the newly self-appointed emperor of the seraphim, speaks through his invisible translator Razgut, a Fallen angel stripped of his wings and exiled from Eretz. Jael warns humanity that creatures called "the Beasts" are coming and requests human weapons to fight them. Riots, mass baptisms, and sectarian violence erupt worldwide.

In Morocco, Karou, a blue-haired young woman who is secretly a chimaera resurrectionist reborn in a human body, leads a small rebel army from a desert kasbah. Akiva, the seraph warrior known as Beast's Bane, arrives with his fierce sister Liraz to warn that Jael's Dominion army has pushed through a portal into the human world. Akiva proposes an alliance between his Misbegotten soldiers, the emperor's outcast bastard legion, and the chimaera rebels. To everyone's astonishment, General Thiago, the White Wolf, accepts. The chimaera do not know that Karou killed the real Thiago after he attacked her and sealed the soul of Ziri, the last natural-born Kirin (Karou's own near-extinct tribe), into the general's body. Only Karou, Issa (the serpent-woman chimaera who helped raise her in Brimstone's household), the chimaera soldier Haxaya, and Karou's human best friends Zuzana Nováková and Mikolas "Mik" Vavra know the deception. Ziri must impersonate the Wolf convincingly enough to steer the army toward peace.

Akiva flies ahead to the Kirin caves, Karou's ancestral mountain homeland, and persuades the Misbegotten camped there to accept the alliance. When the combined company arrives and the two armies face each other, someone flashes hamsas, the chimaera's magic eye-tattoos that cause seraphim debilitating pain, and a hidden archer kills a chimaera mount. Both sides surge toward violence until Akiva unconsciously releases a pulse of overwhelming despair that freezes every soldier in place. Ziri, as Thiago, seizes the moment with a speech of restraint that holds the fragile peace. The pulse radiates across Eretz, drawing the attention of the Stelians, fire-eyed seraphim from the mysterious Far Isles, whose young queen Scarab sets out to hunt the unknown magus responsible.

A war council convenes. Karou argues against both a direct assault and closing the portals, warning that a battle between "angels" and "demons" on Earth would confirm Jael's narrative and provoke humanity into arming him. That night, Akiva creates a counter-sigil, a closed-eye scar that neutralizes the hamsas' effect on any seraph who bears it. When Haxaya leads soldiers to ambush Liraz in the deep caves, Ziri discovers the attack, kills Haxaya to protect both Liraz and his secret identity, and carries the wounded angel to the thermal pools.

Karou finds Akiva alone, and he reveals the counter-sigil: Her touch no longer hurts him. The crisis triggers Karou's breakthrough. Inspired by Akiva's ability to burn a handprint into flesh at any distance, she proposes marking Jael and threatening to ignite the mark unless he leaves Earth peacefully. The council adopts this plan. Akiva marks all Misbegotten with the counter-sigil, enabling mixed battalions, and Karou performs resurrections, secretly including Haxaya for later use.

On Earth, Eliza and her mentor Dr. Chaudhary are brought to Morocco, where authorities have discovered chimaera corpses Karou left behind. Eliza's lab rival Morgan Toth steals her phone, leaks encrypted photos of the bodies, and sends a fabricated message falsely identifying Eliza as "Elazael," the missing child prophet of a family cult claiming angelic descent. Overwhelmed by ancestral memories encoded in her DNA, Eliza collapses into a fugue state, speaking fluent Seraphic, the language of the seraphim.

The rebel army departs the caves but is ambushed by thousands of Dominion soldiers. Ziri orders Karou, Akiva, and Liraz to escape through the portal to complete their mission. At the portal, Liraz kicks Akiva through in her place, choosing to stay and fight, then burns the portal shut behind her.

Karou's associate Esther Van de Vloet, a centuries-old diamond dealer, arranges transport to Rome and intelligence on Jael's location. Esther, however, has been secretly offering Jael weapons in exchange for mining rights to Eretz and betrays Karou's mission. Before being expelled from the hotel, Mik steals Esther's entire stash of wish medallions crafted by Brimstone, the chimaera wish-monger who raised Karou.

Karou, Akiva, and the chimaera soldier Virko infiltrate the Vatican, where they find Razgut waiting in Jael's bed as a trap. Forty Dominion soldiers flood the chamber, but Akiva speaks the name "Haxaya," and the fox chimaera, secretly resurrected and smuggled along, materializes and seizes Jael. Razgut hurls a knife at Akiva's heart, but the blade passes through him. Akiva burns his handprint into Jael's chest and delivers the ultimatum: leave Earth or die. Jael, terrified, orders his soldiers to stand down. Above St. Peter's Square, Karou and Akiva share their first kiss, spiraling invisibly through the night air.

On August 12, the Dominion army files back through the Uzbekistan portal, and Akiva burns it shut. Afterward, Zuzana and Mik use a gavriel, a powerful wish from the stolen stash, to heal Eliza. Wings of living fire sprout from her back, and the ancestral knowledge within her resolves into coherent understanding: maps of the multiverse and memories of the Cataclysm, an ancient disaster in which seraphim explorers unleashed world-devouring monsters called nithilam that consumed their home world, Meliz. Eliza reveals that her ancestor's maps show another portal to Eretz.

Karou and Akiva return to Eretz through this portal and find Jael's camp already taken by their allies. Liraz and the Misbegotten achieved a mysterious victory, and the Second Legion, the Empire's common army, has joined the rebel cause. Ziri died in battle, but Liraz gleaned his soul into her canteen. Karou resurrects him in his true Kirin form, ending the deception at last.

Scarab and Akiva's Stelian grandmother Nightingale reveal the truth about his power. Sirithar, the magical energy Akiva draws upon, is the substance of the veils holding the universes apart. The Stelians spend their lives reinforcing these veils against the nithilam, paying with their own vitality. Akiva's uncontrolled ability to drain sirithar without tithing, without repaying the cost from his own life force, has been thinning the veil. He must go to the Far Isles to learn control, or be killed. He agrees.

Eliza arrives in Eretz riding a stormhunter, an enormous flying creature tamed by Mik's violin. When Scarab declares there are no godstars, Eliza delivers a telepathic vision of radiant warrior figures and explains that the myth is not past but prophecy. Everyone recognizes themselves in the vision. Scarab declares that they will become the godstars.

The epilogue spans months. The chimaera begin excavating Brimstone's buried cathedral beneath the ruins of Loramendi while Karou roams the landscape, waiting to glean thousands of buried chimaera souls. Akiva trains in the Far Isles, building a house on an island for the life he hopes to share with Karou. Ziri and Liraz's bond deepens, and Mik proposes to Zuzana. Eventually Karou travels to the Far Isles, where she and Akiva reunite. They break a wishbone together, beginning not a happy ending but "a happy middle," with the knowledge that a war against the nithilam still looms.