A year after the Great Sickness forced the villages of River Valley into isolation, the quarantine is finally lifted. Aquia, the adopted son of Anahita's spiritual leader, and Yewen, a former monk from the Monastery of the Trees, are sent to tabulate the living and the dead, and to gather their stories for the official ledgers.
But the world they were sent to record no longer exists. They discover entire villages died from the sickness, while others survived by isolating themselves even from each other. The farther they travel, the more they learn about the survivors and their villages through their art, their music, and their spiritual changes. Their experiences begin to change them as well, and they start to question everything they once knew as true.