Untold millennia ago, the gods abandoned humanity and the sun turned from a hot, life-giving yellow to a cold blue-white. The warm land of Ekdu transformed from a lush paradise into a cold wasteland where humanity has to scratch out a meagre living from the flinty, constantly frozen soil. Alia is a peasant girl from a tiny, horrendously poor village sold to the queen's guards by her father. She and four other girls are brought to the Abode of the Dead, a vast necropolis located inside a mountain and sealed away from the rest of the world with solid iron doors. She fears that she might end up as a sacrifice for a terrible monster kept in the maze-like Abode by the Queen of Ekdu, who occasionally has her soldiers enter the Abode to harvest a gem of immortality which grows in the beast's body. Will Alia or any of the girls survive in the Abode? Will the monster eat their hearts as they fear it might?