Finley is weary. The Order of Some has been inundated with human inventions and innovations, all things that threaten to make humans less dependent on witchkind's secret magic, and Finley has been traveling the world putting a stop to them. And now, to add to his fatigue, he's been saddled with an apprentice who has highly-placed relatives, and who is absolutely incompetent with her magic. And... he's beginning to lose a little bit of his faith in the Order. Some of the inventions he's been sent to stop or sabotage seem... harmless. Beneficial, even, to human and witchkind alike. Finley's beginning to wonder if the Order has lost its way.
But something bigger is going on. The cabal of humans who actively oppose the Order are becoming cleverer, hiding new innovations in tiny, out-of-the-way settlements that have remained out of the Order's view. But even when he discovers one of these settlements, Finley starts to have serious doubts about the Order's mission and its increasingly hard-line stance that humanity remain mired in the past and not allowed to grow or change.