Dawn of the Firebird by Sarah Mughal

Here is a summary with spoilers for Dawn of the Firebird by Sarah Mughal

In a prologue, it is expelined that humanity once received heavenly magic from three great birds: the raven, the crane, and the firebird, or Simorgh. Each bird chose a human tribe and granted its people access to supernatural power. Human competition over land and power eventually produced generations of war, and the heavenly birds disappeared, taking most of the magic with them. Flash foward to meet Khamilla Zahr-zad, he discarded daughter of Emperor Fatih Zahr-zad. In her world now, magic is rare, while warfare between the major kingdoms remains widespread. 

Khamilla begins life without a formal name and is treated as an outsider by the nomadic tribe because of the strange relationship she has with birds. Birds gather around her, which causes some members of the tribe to regard her as cursed or unnatural. Her mother, Uma, raises her within the Usur community, while Babshah Khatun, the khan’s favored wife and chief folkteller, takes Khamilla on as an apprentice. Khamilla learns storytelling and the traditions of her people, and the stories themselves are connected to the supernatural system of the world. 

While all of Khamilla’s tribe was peaceful, violence eventually reaches the tribe. A raid destroys the safety of Khamilla, killing members of her community and family, and shattering her relationship with the life she knew.  By the end, her tribe of 2000 dwindled down to 200. During the violence, Khamilla’s dormant nūr, or heavenly magic, awakens. Nūr allows its wielder to channel cosmic light through a heavenly bond, making Khamilla extraordinarily valuable because the magic that had once been widespread has become extremely rare. Her emergence as a wielder changes the way other people perceive her. She is no longer merely the strange, nameless daughter of a nomad; she is potentially a weapon. The destruction of her home also begins the pattern that dominates her life: whenever she develops a sense of belonging, violence destroys it.

Khamilla is subsequently brought into the household of her biological father, Emperor Fatih Zahr-zad, ruler of Azadniabad. At first the Emperor wants nothing to do with her, knowing that she was raised as a peasent. Her acceptance into the imperial family is conditional on her usefulness. She is given the name Khamilla only after she has demonstrated that her powers make her worth claiming, and her relationship with her father remains cold and distant. Rather than receiving the unconditional recognition she wants from him, she is trained to become an imperial weapon. She studies combat, martial arts, and poisons, while learning the expectations associated with the emperor’s household. The poisons is the hardest part for her, as the Emperor wants her to be tested on a poison at least once a month, but he moves it to more than three times. The palace is itself a dangerous environment as well; poisoning and political manipulation are things she constantly has to look out for. Dunya, one of the women within the imperial household, becomes openly hostile toward Khamilla, and Khamilla survives repeated attempts of being poisoned by her.

Her strongest relationship in the palace is with her half-brother Eliyas, who treats her with considerably more warmth than their father does. Eliyas is involved with interpreting dreams and understanding the supernatural system surrounding heavenly contracts. Khamilla nevertheless remains desperate for her father's approval, especially because she knows that Eliyas is one of the Emperors favorites. She interprets loyalty to him and to Azadniabad as a way of earning the belonging she has been denied. This becomes crucial because her loyalty eventually leads her into actions that destroy the very relationships she depends upon.

The political situation deteriorates as the rival empire of Sajamistan arrives and changes everything. Khamilla's family and clan are caught up in conflict with Sajamistan, and the destruction of her people is attributed to the rival empire. Khamilla consequently develops an intense desire for revenge. The death of Eliyas and the collapse of her remaining family connections intensify this fixation. Khamilla eventually betrays Eliyas to her father, after which Eliyas is executed; her mother also dies by suicide. Because Khamilla associates these losses with the political enemies surrounding her family, she becomes increasingly committed to destroying Sajamistan rather than questioning the assumptions and stories that she was brought up with.

Khamilla eventually decides that the most effective way to obtain revenge is to infiltrate Sajamistan rather than attack it directly. She travels to the city of Za’skar, a major scholarly and military center, and conceals her identity while entering its military academy. The academy trains Eajīz, warriors who combine martial arts, supernatural abilities, military strategy, and spiritual practices. Khamilla's objective is to learn enough about the enemy to help destroy it from within. The academy introduces her to a very different ideology from the one she learned in Azadniabad. Sajamistan has its own religious and cultural traditions, including a strong association with death, sacrifice, and the heavenly raven. Khamilla initially regards these beliefs as belonging to an enemy culture, but her education gradually makes that simplistic distinction harder to maintain.

At Za’skar, Khamilla encounters instructors and students who challenge her both physically and intellectually. Yabghu becomes one of the figures who pushes against her assumptions about war and power. Khamilla is also forced to study extensive historical material, and these texts become increasingly important because they present versions of history that contradict what her father taught her. The more she learns, the less certain she becomes that Azadniabad's wars were defensive or morally justified. The supposedly barbaric enemies described by her father are not simply the villains she believed them to be. Both empires have participated in violence, expansion, and the manipulation of history to justify their actions. The academy therefore becomes more than a place where Khamilla learns how to fight; it becomes the place where the ideological foundation of her revenge begins to collapse.

Khamilla also forms relationships with younger pazktab students. She initially treats the children primarily as useful assets. She uses money that she eanred to hire them to spy for her. Eventually she ends up training them and organizing them into a squadron. These kids range from the age of 4 to 18 years old. It makes her realize how little she knows of kids and how to react and interact with them. Her involvement with them gradually becomes one of the clearest indications that she is capable of caring about something other than revenge. Arezu and No-Namem, in particular, becomes important to her. The children challenge Khamilla's emotional isolation and force her to confront the consequences of treating human beings as expendable pieces in a war. Thanks to their training, the group participates in the Marka tournament, a competition involving military squadrons attempting to advance in rank. Khamilla's squadron succeeds despite the disadvantages placed against it, and her reputation within Za’skar grows. Some of the higher ups are upset that she used children, Khamilla said it was a tactical movement that no one else decided to use. 

Cemil, one of the schools best, is furious with how Khamilla won. The two have been at constant odds since they met. Their clashes expose similarities between them: both have been shaped by violence, both understand survival, and both have been conditioned to see other people through the lens of war. Because of her win, Cemil wants to fight her himself, and she has just over a year to train to do so. If she doesn’t win, she will be kicked out of the school. If she wins, she will get a very high rank. So she starts to train. 

During this time of training, Khamilla's psychological state starts to break down. She experiences time-blanks, periods in which portions of her memory disappear. These episodes are connected to traumatic events that she cannot emotionally process. Her mind essentially protects her from unbearable memories by removing them from conscious awareness.

The missing memories are connected to one of the children, No-Name. As her powers grow and her memories continue to fracture, No-Name becomes increasingly influential. Rather than simply being an imaginary manifestation of Khamilla's mind, No-Name ultimately proves to have an independent supernatural existence connected to the jinn and to the forbidden magic known as Mitra.

The magic system that Khamilla believed to be gone, becomes more significant as Khamilla learns about the Gates of Heaven. These are increasingly powerful techniques that allow a wielder to access deeper levels of heavenly power. The heavenly birds are not simply sources of magical energy; they are connected to contracts, bonds, sacrifice, and the history of humanity's wars. Khamilla's ability to use nūr makes her capable of reaching powers that ordinary soldiers cannot. The greater the power she accesses, however, the greater the cost. 

Khamilla eventually discovers the existence of Mitra, a forbidden form of black magic. The truth about Mitra connects her own history to the supernatural forces manipulating the war. Her Mitra comes in handy for her when it is time to fight Cemil after training for over a year. She goes into the fight with no one on her side except the children. The whole town and school are cheering against her. It is a brutal fight between the two, but soon as her Mitra is used Khamilla wins. Though during the fight the Mitra transfers her to a godly part, which she believes she wans’t meant to have seen. She also begins recovering memories that contradict her understanding of her past. One of the most important revelations concerns her father and her own actions: Khamilla eventually realizes that she herself killed her father, despite having previously suppressed the memory. Her “time-blanks” have therefore hidden not only traumatic experiences inflicted upon her but also actions she herself committed. This revelation forces her to confront the fact that she has not merely been a passive victim of the imperial conflict. She has become an active participant in the violence she once believed would give her justice.

The war eventually reaches a much larger scale. Khamilla, now with a higher rank,  is sent into active conflict and experiences the consequences of the war beyond the academy. At the Arsduq Valley, she witnesses catastrophic violence and the destruction of people she has come to care about. The death of Arezu is particularly important. By this point, Khamilla's relationship with the pazktab children has changed substantially, so Arezu's death is no longer merely the loss of a soldier or student. It becomes another personal loss that pushes Khamilla back toward the rage that has controlled her throughout the novel. Her grief becomes the immediate catalyst for her decision to pursue the greatest level of heavenly power available to her.

Khamilla ultimately chooses to pursue the Eighth Gate, which allows her to summon the Simorgh, the legendary firebird and third heavenly bird. The power is not freely given. The Gates of Heaven demand a sacrifice based on what the person using them values most. Khamilla asks for enough power to protect the Camel Road rather than simply continuing the war between the empires. She gains access to the Simorgh's power, but the cost is devastating: the place that matters most to her, Tezmi’a, her childhood homeland, cannot be saved. The choice therefore turns her original desire for revenge into something much larger and far more destructive.

Eventually Khamilla arrives to Warlord Akashun and using the power of the Simorgh against the forces responsible for the continuing war. She kills Akashun and unleashes a supernatural flood. The resulting catastrophe extends far beyond a single battlefield. Water overwhelms enormous portions of the warring territories, and the destruction becomes continental in scale. Nūr barriers protect the Camel Road and birds carry civilians away from areas being destroyed, but enormous numbers of people and settlements are nevertheless affected. Khamilla has effectively achieved the kind of overwhelming power she spent her life seeking, but she has done so by unleashing destruction on a massive scale.

The most painful consequence is that Tezmi’a is destroyed by the flood. Her final use of heavenly power therefore creates the ultimate contradiction in her story: she obtains enough power to reshape the world, but the price of that power is the loss of the place she had been trying to protect. 

The final revelations concern No-Name. After the catastrophic events, No-Name is no longer simply perceived as an internal presence. She becomes a separate entity and reveals that she is connected to an ancient jinn and to the Mitra bargain made around Khamilla's birth. No-Name is connected to the devouring or removal of part of Khamilla's soul, meaning that the memories and pieces of identity Khamilla has repeatedly lost were not simply psychological phenomena. Her fragmented sense of self has a supernatural cause as well. The entity has been feeding on Khamilla and manipulating her trajectory while appearing to be an aspect of Khamilla herself.

It is also revealed that General Jezakiel, the Sepāhbad, has been manipulating events from another direction. His actions and interest in Khamilla are revealed to have been part of a larger political strategy. Rather than simply being another military figure who happens to encounter Khamilla, he has his own agenda concerning the emperor, Akashun, and the broader political conflict. 

The epilogue ends with Khamilla alive but profoundly changed. After the flood and the destruction of the old empires, Khamilla is left to deal with the consequences of what she has done, while the surviving powers begin to reckon with the new world created by the Simorgh. Her connection to No-Name becomes even more significant, as the truth about No-Name’s nature and her connection to Khamilla’s soul makes it clear that Khamilla cannot simply separate herself from the darkness that has followed her since birth. The epilogue also confirms that Khamilla’s identity and lineage are more complicated than she understood, with the Sepāhbad recognizing her as Khamilla Zahr-zad, the eighth child of Emperor Fatih Zahr-zad.