In the small town of Beaver Hollow, West Virginia, forester Mark Steele has experienced the same reoccurring vision since he was a boy one that foreshadows a towering tree, menacing premonitions and his own suffocating demise. Hundreds of miles away, Tess McCoy, a former captain in the United States Army, harbors a debilitating secret and can't get far enough from her mountain roots to save her life. When a mystifying accident takes the life of Tess' younger brother, a series of preternatural events are set into motion, propelling the former lovers from the sleepy town's oak-lined streets to the ever-changing seasons of an aberrant land a wondrous otherworld called the Shade. Here, within this tethered realm, Mark and Tess learn of an apocalyptic pact made sixty-five years ago and find themselves caught in an ageless war that rages between two fabled demigods a war that threatens to crest its mythical borders and pour without mercy into our own.