The five cities of man surround the Sea of Dekatos. The ancient city-states are filled with towers, stone pyramids, soaring catwalks, arching bridges and jade castles. The bronze age men and women fight, love, war and conquer against the backdrop of five massive, sprawling cities. Char, city of chariots, deploys her army in the nearby deserts. In Yang, where nightly winds blow in gusts of hot sand, they raise an army of heavily armored footmen. Bowmen of Lau Cing, with copper weapons and bronze chainmail, train to fight even during heavy desert storms. Formations of swordsmen pour from the pagoda's of Hecai while Anshi fields a legion of grim, dedicated female warriors. The city-states wage constant war until a new enemy threatens. Blue scaled aquatics rise from the sea, water streaming from their iridescent scales, and the five cities face a new and more terrible enemy.

Chemistry happens, in more ways than one. Trapped four hundred feet down, Serge and Gayle fight to survive while preventing an unspeakable evil from reaching the surface. "I tried cutting the tension in this story with a knife before eventually resorting to a rusty chainsaw." Four hundred feet below the surface of company-mining-town Thurber, Texas a dangerous experiment within a clandestine lab explodes. If the survivors can't uncover the cause of the explosion while containing the monstrous threat it has released, thousands of others will suffer an even worse fate.