Over the centuries of knowing the end was at hand, humanity pulled together to launch probes into space. Primitive ships, at first, carrying embryos to distant systems, relying on machines to incubate and rear the first people of a virgin land beneath an alien sun. On Thalassa, after a journey of 200 years, a colony blossomed, only to fall silent again.

On Earth the Lords of the Last Days lived with no need to care for the future of the world; it was the wildest of times, and the saddest. Last to leave was the Magellan carrying a million homeless; when cataclysm struck, its voyagers witnessed through telescopes the death of Earth and all its wonders, saw the Atlantic boil dry, the pyramids disintegrate, the land of Antarctica briefly bare of ice before fire consumed everything. Then the million slept.

Five hundred years later, the Magellan must make planetfall to repair its quantum drive. Its sleepers awake to find themselves visitors to Thalassa, where a cvilization has, in fact, survived. A clash of cultures unlike any before brings danger, despair, and some very tough decisions for two different peoples far from Earth - and its distant songs.