People suffered under Det Morson's power. When the wizard Mor joined the fight, Det & his infamous Rondoval castle were destroyed. But the victory was not complete, for the conquerors found a baby amidst the rubble: Det's son, Pol. Unwilling to kill the child, Mor took him to a world where the ways of magic were considered mere legends--a world called Earth. Young Mark Marakson is obsessed with devices, building water wheels & later, steam engines. He doesn't understand why people rely on magicians rather than using machinery. Young Pol, meanwhile, grows up a poet, musician & singer, marked by a white streak in his dark hair. He's a disappointment to the man he regards as his father, an engineer. Sometimes he sees glowing strands in the air which he touches to make things happen. Ostracised, Mark wanders the hills & finds a machine graveyard from an ancient war between magic & technology. Restarting them, he returns on a flying machine for his childhood sweetheart, only to be assaulted by the villagers, losing an eye. Returning to the graveyard he creates a machine army for revenge. Realizing the world's balance is disturbed, Mor goes to retrieve Pol to counter Mark, revealing Pol's heritage & powers to him. Once Pol is back, Mor has to return to the technology world to balance out the transfer. He dies in a park where every tree, bird & insect is artificial. Pol must find his way around Castle Rondoval. The strands he uses to perform magic are all about. He finds a thief who was in the castle when Mor cast a sleep spell on it. Revived, the thief becomes his helper. He also discovers Det's dragons asleep in the dungeons. Reviving the mightiest one, who recognizes him as his former master's son, he then has to set out on a quest to find the three segments of his father's magical staff, scattered across the world by Mor. He's accompanied by Mark's former sweetheart, creating a romantic triangle. The quest requires him to defeat several magic guardians & traps. Completing it, he's able to take on & defeat Mark Marakson, restoring the world balance. In doing so, he loses the girl's affections. He's left to seek his future in Rondoval, among old magics left by his father. The tale's next part appears in Madwand.

Corwin finds his world dissolving around him when his father Oberon, disguised as Corwin’s friend, steals the Jewel of Judgment so that he may defeat the evil Brand, in a conclusion to the first Amber series.

In our world, called the Verite, he is a Scottish laird, an engineer, and a master of virtual reality design. In the computer-generated universe of Virtu, created by the crash of the World Net, he is a living legend. Scientist and poet with a warrior’s soul, Donnerjack strides like a giant across the virtual landscape he helped to shape. And now he has bargained with Death himself for the return of love. The Lord of Entropy claimed Ayradyss, Donnerjack’s beloved dark-haired lady of Virtu, with no warning, leaving a hole in the Engineer’s heart. But Death offered to return her to him for a price: a palace of bones… and their first-born child. Since offspring have never before resulted from any union of the two worlds, Donnerjack accepts Death’s conditions—and leads his reborn lover far from the detritus and perpetual twilight of Deep Fields to his ancestral Scottish lands, hoping to build a sanctuary and a self for Ayradyss in the first world. But there is no escaping, because cataclysmic change is taking place in Virtu. A bizarre new religion is sweeping through this ever-shifting universe where the homely can be virtually beautiful, the lame can walk and the blind can see. Now it’s threatening to spill over into Verite. And its credo is a call for a different kind of order. For all the ancient myths still occupy Virtu. And the Great Gods on Mt. Meru are amassing great armies in anticipation of the time when a vast computer system attempts to take over the reality that constructed it.