Onyx Storm recap

Previously: Violet Sorrengail was raised to be a scribe and ordered into Basgiath War College's Riders Quadrant by her mother, the general commanding it. Physically fragile and expected to die in her first weeks, she survived on preparation rather than strength and bonded two dragons at once, the black morningstartail Tairn and the golden feathertail Andarna, and her signet turned out to be lightning. Tairn's mating bond with Sgaeyl tied her to Xaden Riorson, son of the executed leader of Tyrrendor's separatist rebellion, and their hostility became an alliance and then a relationship. At the border town of Resson she learned that Navarre's leadership has spent a century lying: the venin, dark wielders who drain the life out of the land, are real, the wards protecting the kingdom are failing, villages have been abandoned in secret, and Xaden's marked riders have been arming Poromiel against them from the rebel city of Aretia, where Violet's brother Brennan turned out to be alive. Her second year was spent hiding all of that inside a school run by an interrogator, raising new wards for Tyrrendor, arming it with weapons that can kill venin, and building a real alliance with Poromiel's gryphon fliers. It ended with the wards at Basgiath failing and the venin attacking the college outright: the school was devastated, General Lilith Sorrengail died holding the line, Andarna woke from a long sleep as something no rider had seen before, and Xaden saved Violet by drawing power from the earth the way the venin do, becoming venin himself and concealing it.