Sixteen-year-old Alexina, estranged from society by her unrealized extrasensory powers, rescues Taryn, a teenager from the parallel world of mindpower, who awakens Alexina’s long-hidden gift. Awed by the discovery of her psychic ability and hoping to belong at last, Alexina eagerly joins Taryn and his companions in their Quest to recover the living Stone, the heart of the mindpower world stolen by a renegade from their universe. The search leads them deep into the wilderness, to an enchanted palace surrounded by thorns. There the thief waits, a being of incalculable strength who calls to Alexina with a power she cannot deny, and a promise she does not understand. In the battle that follows, good and evil become indistinguishable, and Alexina learns that friendship does not always guard against betrayal.

Long ago, when the worlds were one... So begins the Tale, the ancestral legend Bron's family has guarded for a thousand years. Once, they were the keepers of the Stone, the most sacred object on earth, from which all the powers of Mind are drawn. But when the conflict between Mind and Hand split the worlds apart, the Stone was seized by an ambitious sorcerer. To keep the new world from contamination, he created rigid Limits circumscribing which tools might be made and which knowledge might be pursued-laws brutally enforced by a group of Guardians known as the Arm of the Stone. For centuries, Bron's family has concealed the secret of its heritage. But when Bron's brother invents a new kind of plow-an unpardonable heresy in the world of the Guardians-the Arm of the Stone reaches in once again to tear them apart. Fleeing for his life, Bron vows revenge. To strike the Guardians down, he will become a Guardian himself. But Bron cannot know how much that choice will change him. Nor does he anticipate the hatred of a powerful enemy, or the love of a beautiful Guardian named Liliane...whose mission is to destroy him.

At the heart of the fortress lay the Garden. At the heart of the Garden lay the Stone. — a living entity of power beyond understanding. Then came Bron, his arrival long foretold as the one who would restore the balance to a world torn asunder centuries ago. But Bron had other plans. He stole the Stone...and vanished. Now Bron's daughter Cariad, a skilled empath and assassin, must follow the footsteps of a father she's never known into the depths of the same fortress. Waiting there is Jolyon, her father's greatest enemy, a man whose thirst for domination is matched only by his taste for blood. Cariad must learn the secret of Jolyon's strength before it is too late. For just as her father's arrival was prophesied, so too is his return.