On The River, life is cheap, violent, and usually short. Two generations ago, city dwellers ate their own dead, and the highest authority anywhere was the Boss of your building, or maybe your block. The only law was survive at all costs. Priests of the Samaqel frequently passed through, extolling the virtues of worshipping the ten mile long Jhareesh which, Its prodigious length coiled around the vast height of Mount Thunder far to the north, had created The River, and everything that lived there, tens of thousands of years before. But then a mercenary captain named Jeressa took control of a city called Ona-Tengu, declared herself a Queen, and lopped the head off the monstrous Child of the Samaqel, causing the Samaqel Itself to perish from shock. Civilization took root as Ona-Tengu became The River's first lawful Realm. Jeressa perished fighting off an invasion from the eternally power hungry Empire of Man, but her Realm has, to date, endured - although now, forty years after her death, Kameron, the Realm's current Monarch, is foolish, vain, and weak... the perfect puppet to allow an ever- changing coalition of Tengish political factions to enrich themselves at the Realm's expense, but not remotely what Ona-Tengu needs, to hold it together against the rebellious rural Durshi and Wild Jeopard tribes, and not what the River needs, to fight off yet another bid for power from the skulking, scheming Empire. Against this troubled backdrop, a Durshi merchant named Ashara Go hires a handful of hard bitten mercenaries to accompany his old friend Sankara Jin on one last journey to the Giant Mountains. But Sankara Jin is far more than he seems and he knows far more than he's willing to say - and while his reluctant companions have no idea what's really lies behind their 'little walk in the woods', they are destined to learn some hard truths about themselves, each other, the cantankerous old warrior they have signed on to protect, and the Realm itself. But the hardest, most deeply hidden truth of all is this -- the fate of the entire River, and every living creature on, in, or living alongside it, hangs on the success or failure of their mission!
