Naill Renfro and his mother were just two members of the flotsam that had washed up in the Dipple, the vast refugee camp on Korwar that had taken in the dispossessed of the destroyed worlds, then forgotten about them.

In order to buy his mother the drugs she required end her days in oblivion, if not peace, Naill sold the last thing of worth he had left; himself. He knew the planet Janus would not be a pleasant world, else there would have been no need for indentured labour. But both the service and the planet are living hells, right up to the time Naill found a pretty tangled in the roots of a felled forest giant.

Then he found the true meaning of hell as a disease overwhelmed him, leaving the Garthmen to abandon him to a strange fate as he is transformed into a new green skinned Ayyar of Iftcan, a civilization that had died more years ago than either Naill or Ayyar cared to think of...