Under the leadership of the founding ancestors of the Yavuztürk Dynasty, the KTB (Kök-Turan Birliği—the Root-Turan Union) is established. In time the sundered nations are gathered beneath a single roof of order and justice, and the borders upon the earth are lifted.

The KTB carries its borders beyond the earth, into the deeps of space. On the Moon's Sea of Tranquillity (Mare Tranquillitatis) vast silver trade-stations with transparent domes are raised. To make the red, dead sands of Mars habitable—to terraform them, to weave the planet an artificial magnetosphere—mountain-sized Atmospheric Genesis Engines are built. Mankind lives the most magnificent age of the universe.

The attempt of the KTB's engineers to integrate the mortal human mind, unfiltered and by force, into the Absolute Will of the universe (the Unity network) ends in an absolute catastrophe. The unerring immune system of the cosmos perceives this pride as a virus, engages, and violently locks the whole web. The nervous systems of the billions of humans directly bound to the web suffer sensory overload and turn to ash within seconds. Only those not bound to the web survive: underground labourers, exiles cut off from communication, and a handful of the wise who foresaw this catastrophe and had long since pulled their own plugs. These Sages who sensed the collapse beforehand (the ancestors of the Ak-Kams), to prevent the system from being forced open again by brute strength, engage the Ergenekon Protocol and seal the waking-codes for ever into the Chrome Kurgan at the summit of the Altai. That day, the golden age of mankind wakes into a dark nightmare.

To preserve the uncorrupted technology, the Root-Tongue, and the organic healing of the last Sages who came through the flames of the Great Blackout, a withdrawal is made into the sheer valleys of the Altai. The valley, isolated from the outer world by a vast electromagnetic storm-shield (the Weeping Rocks), keeps the pure memory of the cosmos for ages.

The masses fleeing radiation and the disasters of the acid rains build vast mobile cities (caravans) from old nuclear cargo-trains and ship-keels welded together, and begin an unending nomadry upon the crust of the earth.

The irreversible philosophical gulf between one-and-thirty-year-old Aral—of shaman nature, a seeker of truth and free will—and forty-year-old İlteriş ends in the legendary duel beneath the acid rains. İlteriş loses half his face, and to keep Aral far from the Kurgan he sets him aboard an autonomous train bound for the freezing glaciers of the north, sending him into exile.

It is the year the historians' pens break, the year the rusted wheels stop. In the shadow of the age-long Cosmic Quarantine, upon the freezing summit of the Kurgan, a mortal waits with an ancient tablet in his hand. The return of the exiled Seeker Aral from the Altai, after his ten-year Çile, is about to trigger the apocalyptic war that will shake the whole Solar System, from the red redoubts of Mars to the silver oligarchs of the Moon. The sky will either be lit by a new order, or the universe will this time burn in its own ambition, beyond return. The records of the old world end here; the epic of apocalypse and resurrection begins with the first step the Seeker will take...