The Stargate Atlantis team discover a city on a moon that's about to plunge into its own sun. But the city which looked as if it had been abandoned turns out to be inhabited by descendants of the Ancients who have fallen into decadence and debauchery. Faced with a dissolute society disinterested in their own fate and unable to escape, the team must fight their way free before being plunged into a fiery death.

Donovan DeChance is a collector of ancient manuscripts and books, a practicing mage, and a private investigator. Over the span of a long life, he has gathered and archived the largest occult library in the world. When a local houngan begins meddling with powers she may not be able to control, a turf war breaks out between a motorcycle club known as The Dragons and a Latin street gang, Los Escorpiones-a war that threatens to open portals between worlds and destroy the city in the process. With his lover, Amethyst, his familiar, Cleo-an Egyptian Mau the size of a small bobcat-the dubious aid of a Mexican sorcerer named Martinez, and the budding gifts of a young artist named Salvatore, DeChance begins a race against time, magic, and almost certain death. The fate of the city rests on his success, and on the rare talent of a boy who walks in two worlds, and dreams of dragons.

On the banks of Lake Drummond, on the edge of The Great Dismal Swamp, there is a tree in the shape of a woman. One dark, moonlit night, two artists met at The Lake Drummond Hotel, built directly on the borderline of North Carolina and Virginia. One was a young woman with the ability to see spirits trapped in trees and stone, anchored to the earth beyond their years. Her gift was to draw them, and then to set them free. The other was a dark man, haunted by dreams and visions that brought him stories of sadness and pain, and trapped in a life between the powers he sensed all around him, and a mundane existence attended by failure. They were Eleanore MacReady, Lenore, to her friends, and a young poet named Edgar Allan Poe, who traveled with a crow that was his secret, and almost constant companion, a bird named Grimm for the talented brothers of fairy-tale fame. Their meeting drew them together in vision, and legend, and pitted their strange powers and quick minds against the depths of the Dismal Swamp itself, ancient legends, and time. Once, upon a shoreline dreary, there was a tree. This is her story.