The Ballad of Falling Dragons is the second installment in Sarah A. Parker’s Moonfall series, following the debut novel that established the world, its mythology, and its central characters. The first book introduced readers to a sprawling fantasy realm shaped by an ancient divine conflict, where gods, fae, and dragons coexist in a precarious balance of power. The extensive front-matter glossary, retained and expanded in this volume, signals the depth of worldbuilding carried forward from book one, including the kingdoms’ political geography, the taxonomy of dragon species, and the unique time-keeping systems that govern daily life in Parker’s universe.

Central to the series’ foundation is the fraught relationship between the mortal kingdoms and the divine beings whose conflicts shaped the world’s history. The series’s fictional world was created by five gods, each associated with one of five elements—Caelis of the aeither, Bulder of the earth, Rayne of the water, Close of the air, and Ignos of fire. The gods peopled the world with humans, fae, and many other creatures, including various breeds of dragons such as the Sabersythes of the Burn, the Moltenmaws of the Fade, and the Moonplumes of the Shade. When dragons die, they rise into the sky to become moons. Occasionally, one of these moons falls to the earth—a rare, cataclysmic event that no one can explain or predict.

In the first book, When the Moon Hatched, Elluin Neván is a human princess of the Shade who develops a close relationship with a female dragon named Slátra. Betrothed to the cruel Tyroth Vaegor, she falls in love with his kind brother, Kaan Vaegor, and becomes pregnant with Kaan’s child. Shortly after the forced marriage, Elluin is rumored to have died and been carried into the sky by Slátra, who becomes a moon. When this moon falls from the sky years later, Elluin emerges alive but unable to remember who she is. She remembers only her middle name, Raeve. Under this name, she becomes a cage fighter and later joins a rebel group called the Fíur du Ath. She soon meets Kaan and begins to fall in love with him all over again, though she doesn’t remember having known him before. As she wrestles with her fragmented memory and sense of identity, the novel reveals that the child Raeve had with Kaan in her former life as Elluin is now a princess of the Shade named Kyzari, and that she has been captured by the Scavenger King, half-brother of the Vaegors. 

In The Ballad of Falling Dragons, the political intrigue between kingdoms intensifies, the consequences of the first book’s revelations unfold, and the romantic relationship between Raeve and Kaan moves into more complex emotional and physical territory.