Some journeys end where the universe begins. Dennis and Abigail Webster have been married ten years. On a winter night above Puget Sound, on a quiet anniversary flight home, their small plane is brought down. They should have died. Instead, they wake aboard a starship - in the company of Mil, a Majoran who is patient, wry, and impossibly old, and his companion Miriam. The Majorans have known Earth since the time of the Romans. They have been waiting, watching, intervening when they could. And now they have come to tell Dennis and Abby the truth: the galaxy is older, stranger, and far more populated than humanity has ever been permitted to know. But the careful distance the Majorans have kept for centuries is ending. Something is moving through the dark between the stars - something that has begun, at last, to notice Earth. And the rescue that saved Dennis and Abby's lives has placed them at the very center of what comes next. Shadow Guardians is a quiet, expansive novel about marriage, mortality, and the staggering strangeness of being small in a very large universe. It is a story written in the contemplative tradition of Becky Chambers and Mary Robinette Kowal - where the most profound questions aren't about technology or galactic war, but about what it means to keep choosing one another when the world you knew has fallen away. The opening movement of The Shadow Cycle - a story about what it means to be human when humanity is no longer the question being asked.