Three years after that fateful scene of his wife’s infidelity in the cellar of the Vandal king, Belisarius is still a troubled man. He sees her betrayal in the way his servants won’t look him in the eye, in the disrespectful smirks from his fellow generals, in the mesmerizing sway of his wife’s hips. Worst of all, he sees it in the charm of a handsome godson who seems to outcompete him for his wife’s affection.

       To distract himself, Belisarius throws himself into the ominous challenge before him: reclaiming the Roman lands lost in Italy half a century earlier. Always outnumbered but rarely outwitted, Belisarius and his five-thousand men occupy and hold Rome against a siege by a hundred-thousand wild Goths. Despite this, his wife’s indiscretions undermine the serenity that should follow his success.

      Far, far away, on a fiery island in the North Atlantic, Hibernian monks investigate a mysterious plume of smoke blanketing the sky and covering the earth in shadows. Their leader, Brendan, makes an ominous discovery about the possibly grim future of humankind and must do whatever it takes to relay the disturbing revelation to the Empress in Constantinople.

       Belisarius is determined to fight on, regardless of the darkened sky, crop failures, and starvation that vex his men. Against all odds, he completes his conquest of Italy, and upon reaching the Gothic capital of Ravenna, is offered the crown of the Western Empire for himself. To end the bloody war, he pretends to accept the offer but is recalled to Constantinople before he can properly secure the Empire’s victory. In Constantinople, he faces the judgment of a suspicious imperial couple and a punitive redeployment to a resurgent Persia. 

     Carried on divine winds, Brendan sails across the known world to deliver his foreboding message of the coming Apocalypse. Not even Theodora, Empress of the East herself, can discredit the monk’s portentous story of the erupting mountain, a darkening over all the earth, and widespread famine. When the bubonic plague reaches Constantinople’s harbor, unleashing death in the city and threatening the life of Justinian, it seems as though Brendan’s prophecy about the End of Days has arrived.

     Belisarius must face the cold hard truth which Brendan brings that the new world order he is working to establish may be burning to the ground.