When the Moon Hatched

When the Moon Hatched is the first novel of Sarah A. Parker's Moonfall series, published in 2024 by HarperCollins and its Voyager imprint, among others. The world it is set in has a visible history: when dragons die they sail into the sky and curl into balls beyond gravity, where they stay as moons, so the night is full of the dead.

Raeve works as an assassin for a rebellion and is good at not being caught, until a rival bounty hunter ruins her run. She ends up a prisoner of the fae who run the capital, kept alive as a message rather than a person, which is the position the book opens from. The rebellion she serves is called Fíur du Ath, and it operates in a city governed by fae whose authority she has spent her working life defying. Her captors have their own use for her, and none of it involves the work she was doing before.

Kaan Vaegor took a king's head and wore the melted crown, and none of it filled the hole left by the person he lost. A rumour sends him into the city's high-security prison, where he finds Raeve, and something about her pulls at a history neither of them can fully see yet. The story runs the two of them along the same track, with each chapter following one of them towards the other. Their reasons for being in the capital are not the same, and the difference is what the book spends its length working out.

Parker builds the book out of two damaged people, a rebellion, a court and a sky full of dead dragons, and it is the first of a series rather than a complete story. Moonfall continues in later volumes, and the first one sets out the world's rules and the two viewpoints the series is told from.