Fire of Life is the story of Phera, a three-mooned planet with night-sky seas of emerald, silver, and blue.

In ancient days, the blood-dark Ebrin River swelled in springtime thaw from hardest winter, overflowed its rocky banks, and flooded the wide-strewn villages of the Chaucau. Forced together, their world unmoored, the fishing people flee from the flood-swept plain to the high mountain woods. They wander the wilderness. Season by season, their numbers thin, many lives lost to hunger, beast, and disease. The surviving Chaucau cross into the central valley. With vacant eyes, they limp into the thick-grassed hills of a prosperous herding people.

The herders absorb the outcast fishers. Generation by generation, the Chaucau forget their ancient language, their mystic river culture. They intermarry, adopt, shed. But a slender thread survives, refusing to forget, sustained by the mythical poetry born of their wilderness flight. This fierce and bitter remnant marches into the boundless desert wasteland. They push beyond the limits of their flesh, hoping to match their ancestors' courage, challenging law of death and decay, hoping for highest Word once more. Through dust and dreams, the wasteland striders march, their eyes bright seared by pouring vision.