Where all things flow together...everything comes apart. Untold millennia ago, the Preservers made the world called Confluence and peopled it with ten thousand extraordinary bloodlines "shaped" from beasts of every sort. Then the Preservers abandoned their creation - leaving behind their law, their bureaucracies...and their trillions of machines, awake or slumbering, in the soil and the water and the air. In the Preservers' absence war came - and a dangerous heresy arose that split the world in two. But a babe swept in on the great river, cradled in the arms of death - the last and, perhaps, greatest of a remarkable bloodline - and now the end times are at hand. And as Yama grows to young manhood, he will make his way from necropolis to metropolis - and through the labrynthine country of the mind - in search of a past and a lost destiny. Each hairbreadth escape will make Yama stronger. And every unanticipated adventure will bring him one step closer to the staggering truth about his heritage and his purpose...and about a world that is not what it appears to be.

Time, Like A River, Must One Day Run Dry.On an artificial world created and seeded with ten thousand bloodlines by the long-vanished Preservers, young Yama's ancestry is unique, for he appears to be the last remaining scion of the Builders, closest of all races to the worshiped architects of Confluence. And on a day near the end of the world, Yama must finally acknowledge the power he neither anticipated nor desires. To the common folk—the unshaped and aboriginal—he is the fulfillment of age-old prophecies. To the functionaries of the Department of Indigenous Affairs, he is a weapon to be molded and used in the bloody civil war raging at the planet's midpoint. But there are still others who have taken notice of Yama as he pursues the hidden secrets of his past. Intelligent powers older than the Builders—as old, perhaps, as the Preservers themselves—are pursuing Yama in turn. And they will stop at nothing to control his present—and, as a result, the future of everything that lives.

The final chapter of the Confluence trilogy finds Yama—the last in the long, proud bloodline that helped create Confluence—as he begins to demonstrate remarkable powers and is courted by two sides in a violent conflict.