Ages ago, sorcerers of unmatched power sundered a world into four realms—sky, stone, fire, and water—then vanished. Over time, magicians learned to work spells only in their own realms and forgot the others. Now only the few who have survived the Labyrinth and crossed the Death Gate know of the presence of all four realms—and even they have yet to unravel the mysteries of their severed world. . . .

When Destina Rosethorn and her companions were transported to a time centuries before their birth—to the days of the Third Dragon War—the Graygem of Gargath brought chaos to the battlefield and changed the course of history. Upon returning to the Inn of the Last Home, where their journey began, Destina’s party discovered a world completely changed. The forces of evil now hold sway over their land. The River of Time is rising, flowing inexorably toward the present day. Destina and her friends must make one last, desperate attempt to restore time’s river to its proper channel.

Sequestered in the blackness of the dreaded Tower of High Sorcery in Palanthas, surrounded by nameless creatures of evil, Raistlin Majere weaves a plan to conquer the darkness - to bring it under his control. Crysania, a beautiful and devoted cleric of Paladine, tries to use her faith to lead Raistlin from the darkness. She is blind to his shadowed designs, and he draws her slowly into his neatly woven trap. Made aware of Raistlin’s plan, a distraught Caramon travels back in time to the doomed city of Istar in the days before the Cataclysm.

To the forest on the shore of the Kingdom of the Isles, the orphan Pug came to study with the master magician Kulgan. But though his courage won him a place at court and the heart of a lovely princess, he was ill at ease with the normal ways of wizardry. Yet Pug's strange sort of magic would one day change forever the fates of two worlds. For dark beings from another world had opened a rift in the fabric of spacetime to being again the age-old battle between the forces of Order and Chaos.

A clash of powerful magical forces sets off the Graygem of Gargath, sending Destina Rosethorn and her companions deeper into the past than she intended—to the age of Huma Dragonsbane and the Third Dragon War. Now, with the Device of Time Journeying shattered, they must find another way back to their own era before the Graygem irrevocably alters history and the Third Dragon War ends in defeat for the forces of good.