The immortals are real, having existed in time for some 200,000 years or more, some of them deified as gods and goddesses in their long lives and their existence had been kept secret, and chronicled by the skolaks, the keepers of their history. One of the more notorious and most powerful of these immortals, Edelon, self-entombed for the last 500 years, is about to be resurrected by her lover Rutheven, finally reunited after all this time; although for Edelon their time apart was but months, for Rutheven his time without her was measured in centuries. Her return to this world also signalled the return of her enemy, the assassin Tervagant.