Shadrathe is Lord High Necromancer of the Darkway. He has awakened an ancient, alien evil on the planet Ahtwan and brought it to earth. Now American soldiers are on Ahtwan fighting an unholy, secret war for possession of the planet. Mat Matterson is an artist living a quiet life in 1960’s Oregon. He knows nothing of secret wars, alien evil, or necromancers of the Darkway. Even if he did, he wouldn’t believe it or want any part of it. The only problem is he doesn’t have a choice. He’s not completely human and he's bound by blood and magic to the Dragon's Egg, a lost talisman of enormous destructive power; and he doesn’t have a clue. His mother was a creature of magic, a shape-shifting Arein warrior and the last of her kind. She wore a human body and married Mat’s human father. Before she died in childbirth, she hid Mat’s halfling nature in a human form, and he grew up believing he was human. His mother left him only an old wedding photograph with a cryptic message bequeathing him her “pride and curse”, the Dragon's Egg. Mat never got any Dragon's Egg and never knew what to make of the letter until a strange compulsion drives him to buy an egg-shaped piece of junk jewelry in a second-hand store. Suddenly, he finds his life being hijacked and thrown into the crosshairs of Shadrathe’s secret war where nothing is what it seems, and everyone wants that piece of junk jewelry. …Including Leaira, a beautiful, mysterious woman who claims the Dragon's Egg belongs to her and threatens to kill Mat to get it, but instead they fall in love as they flee across two worlds pursued by police, FBI, helicopter gunships, black adept wizards and their succubus lovers, and all the demonic creations of an extinct alien race. Even though she loves him, Leaira tries to steal the Dragon's Egg and is lost in a gateway to Ahtwan. Later Mat falls through another gateway and is rescued by Kron the Simple; a telepathic, twenty ton, slightly psychotic, blue dragon with the attitude of a rock star and a penchant for practical jokes. He’s also a great healer and seer although these gifts are often erratic and seldom under his control. Recently, Kron has been having horrific, prophetic visions; a black snarl of bloody time lines of possible futures in which Shadrathe sweeps across the multiverse laying waste to everything and establishing an empire of darkness without end. In only a handful of possible futures does a strange, halfling hero wielding the Dragon’s Egg, cut through the knot of dark futures and release the Light Way; but each time he succeeds, he is betrayed by the corrupting power of the talisman that turns him into something infinitely worse than Shadrathe. In only one possible future does he even come close to success but that timeline is so unsubstantial, so uncertain as to be almost nonexistent. The only thing that is certain is that Kron’s destiny is bound to this halfling’s. Together they must try to defeat Shadrathe, otherwise there is no hope at all. Mat wants nothing to do with any of this. All he wants is to get his life back the way it was before. But there’s no way back, and with Kron’s help he confronts the secret of his halfling nature and fights the ferocious, untamed power of his magic aspect for possession of his body and the corrupting power of the Dragon's Egg for possession of his soul. In the end he becomes not only a creature of almost mythic proportions but also a freakish outcast, a Darktime halfling abomination, hated and feared and the last hope of humanity.