Hope and Love - Pride and Honour. Monsters wander the world of Mikon. Caught in the aftermath of a vicious international war, thousands of refugees have fled the Coastal States, bringing their dangers with them into the wilderness near the untamed Middlelands. Castaways from an imploding civilization - fighting to find and to understand the most dangerous of treasures ...Portunista: innovative, ambitious, intemperate; a maga seeking her path to Imperial glory ...Seifas: dark and lethal, alienating, poetic; a hunter whose words are his tears ...Gaekwar: lanky, laconic, sardonic; 'only a cowherd', yet wielding exotic weaponry ...Othon: the Implacable One; a quiet, quick-thinking giant of a man ...Dagon: arrogant, insecure, buffoonish; a miserable commander with a knack for solving puzzles ...Pooralay: ruthless and compassionate, loud and brusque- when he wants to be; a thug on a mystical quest ...Bomas: renegade killer planning a subtle genocide; Artabanus: self-proclaimed Arbiter, drawing every power to himself; Praxiteles: incompetent madman, possessing and possessed by the Roguent Gamin...In their increasingly desperate struggles - for food, for knowledge, for life itself - what will make the difference between brigades and bands of brigands?