New Babylon may be the capital of the mighty Second Empire. Dirigibles drift over the town, steam trains race down its tracks, as well as the manufacturing plant chimneys never end billowing smoke, even for an instant. The hegemony of research is unquestioned, yet magic hasn’t vanished from the globe. It remains dissolved in the bloodstream of those who are called Illustrious. Hardline reductionists find that hard to accept, but it is not in their power to change the longstanding status quo.

Everything threatens to about The Dormant switch with the loss of life from the widowed Empress, and Leopold Orso, an Illustrious gentleman, may feeling the looming adjustments clearer than most. He feels the attract of far-away lands, but a gloomy previous holds him in place like a dangerous snare. Will the whirlpool of arriving events draw our stressed illustrious hero to the bottom or toss him up to unimaginable heights? And can anything remain to throw him up to?

It’s impossible to say. In the end, there are highly placed conspirators willing to do whatever needs doing just to obtain what’s theirs. Bullets from employed killers, anarchists’ bombs, bloodstream magic of Aztec priests, and electroshock therapy in a psychiatric clinic. Leopold will have a difficult time overcoming everything fate has waiting for you for him and remaining himself through everything.