Shren has been locked in his own mansion's cellar for seven years before one day, he finds the door unlocked, and his house-once filled with parties that his captors, his traitorous servants, threw-silent and empty.Upon closer inspection, Shren finds that his home has only one difference from the days before his imprisonment-a painting gracing one of the walls, a painting of a man with eyes bleeding pitch black. A magicworker has been in his home.Shren leaves, seeking to escape the wrath of the magicworker, should they return. It is then that he discovers their origin, that they are far more insidious and dangerous than he'd ever imagined, and he is inexorably drawn into a journey to stop the magicworkers from taking and corrupting his people as they did in the land they were created.