Stay out of the swamp … It's full of vermin. Chessa is a pious woman, content to live according to the Directives of the Divine and repentant when her spirit begins to stray. But the course of her life is forever altered by an impulsive decision to leave the husband who never loved her. After losing her way in a storm, she washes up on a riverbank in Rittir, the empire’s southernmost kingdom. She has no knowledge of how she got there, she only knows it shouldn’t be possible, because for five long years, Rittir has been trapped behind a mystical Barrier that nothing has been able to breach. Before the Barrier, a man called the Heretic took control of Rittir’s capital, home to the Nessium Empire’s largest port, establishing himself in a seat of power and solidifying the rebellion following him as a formidable threat. No one knows for certain where the Barrier came from or how to get rid of it, but they all agree on one the rest of the empire must be protected from the Heretic, who is determined to dismantle the theocracy no matter the cost. With centuries of peace at risk of collapse, loyalties stretch and tensions rise in the kingdom cut off from the rest of the world. Nothing is simple when truth contradicts power and corruption has always been the root of control.