The great singer Aidan McAllister, a favorite of the gods, shakes the hearts of listeners with his amazing voice and harp playing. At the age of thirteen, Aidan discovers that the cries of battle dragons flying through the sky give him melodies of incomprehensible beauty. At fourteen he is a living legend, a master musician. At twenty-one, Aidan is thrown into prison by order of the king and sentenced to silence... At thirty-eight, he suddenly finds himself free - a voiceless, crippled ghost of who he once was - and dreams of only one thing - to find out why he was so punished. And the first thing he has to learn is that the divine song in his heart has become the song of a beast...