It’s not easy being the youngest of seven sons in a family of notorious sorcerers, especially for Ayden Dracre. In a world where sorcerers practice only dark magic and wizards practice only light magic, Ayden has a problem: He is very bad at being bad. Try as he might, all of his spells to cause mayhem go awry. When he finds out that his family has had enough of his mistakes, he decides to take destiny into his own hands.

Fresh out of college with his Ship Engineer 3rd-Class certificate, Dave Walker’s only thought is to try to find a berth on a corporate ship plying the trade routes between the many habs, orbitals, and moons in the Solar System. The problem for Dave, however, isn't his straight C average; it's that his stepfather, a powerful Earth senator he’s never met, now wants him dead. Forced to take the first berth he can find, Dave ends up on the Iowa Hill, an old tramp freighter running with a minimal crew and nearing the end of its useful life.

In a former life, Jack was gifted, meaning he possessed peculiar abilities. If rich folks found themselves in a jam, Jack could use his talents to get them out of it. Where others were sure to fail, Jack's aristocratic clientele could always count on him to finish jobs cleanly, efficiently, and leave no trace, for which his services commanded a hefty fee. But one day, Jack picked a fight with the wrong man and his old life came to an end. But, as it turned out, his story was far from over.

The ancient magic of wizards was anything but dark. It was the enlightenment that lifted humanity from the squalor of superstition, and the worship of fell spirits and capricious gods, but those days are gone. The shining glory of the sorcerers burned away the subtlety of wisdom, replacing it with easy power, held only in the hands of the elite - a new age built upon the elemental supremacy of aristocrats and the ignorance of the masses.

All Joran wanted was a quiet life of research and study in his alchemy lab. It didn’t seem like so much to ask. But when an emergency at one of his family’s trading posts crops up, his father insists that Joran is the only one that can straighten it out.