It is 1928, a year from Coruscar's Bicentennial and the contentious merger of the classes. On a winter's day at Larimar Keep, a singer is wrongly executed for Class Agitation, the victim of a conspiracy among the dead as well as the living. One of many seeds taking root in a time ripe for revolution.

At the opening of a new season, at Realgar Keep, a symphony that is more than music-for those born with the ability to appreciate it-fills the sky over an amphitheater of stone. Waiting to play his part is one of the four Founding Cores, crystalline manticores the size of a palace. He is newly tuned to a Mode of rebirth.

In the seats reserved for the highest of the Blood Harmonious, battered from the day's Tuning but gloriously alive, Prentice Mica Kalekai is also waiting-impatient to escape to the music she wishes she'd been born to.

Many rows back, in the Common seats, is Chalcy Greenglass, a songwriter with a secret, who has paid a terrible price to possess what a highblood takes for granted.

Their meeting will alter both of their lives, and the course of history.

The Beast at the center of it all dances, delighted by the disruption he has set in motion. Coruscar is already poised for upheaval. But even he will fail to foretell what the Merger truly has in store.

TO TUNE THE BEAST is the debut fantasy novel by Sun Hesper Jansen, author of the poetry collection Fairy of Disenchantment.