Summary
The story begins with an immortal mystic named Aknaton, whose Osirosian race was the ancestor of all humanoid life in the Milky Way galaxy. The Osirosians were faced with a terrible threat, a race of destroying conquerors known as the Zygoteans. The Osirosians massed their power and confronted the Zygoteans directly, but failed to defeat them. The Osirosians withdrew to their heavily guarded world and considered other ways to stop the Zygotean menace.
As the Zygotean power only grew, and the Zygoteans conquered, enslaved, and exterminated more and more of the Milky Way, the Osirosians eventually concluded that they were not capable of stopping the Zygoteans, and that therefore the Milky Way was doomed to a long, slow, horrible death. The Osirosians, unwilling to let the Milky Way be slowly strangled by the Zygoteans, evolved a plan to destroy the Zygoteans, whatever the cost. Running the Zygotean blockade of his homeworld, Aknaton set various events in motion to mature over time into the elements he needed for their final plan. The most important actions he took were: Having done all these things, he returned to his homeworld and waited for the last stand. The Osirosians held out for a hundred thousand years, but in the end the Zygoteans overcame their defenses and destroyed them. Armed with all his race's power and his plan, Aknaton escaped, the only survivor.
Aknaton returned to the worlds he had visited a hundred thousand years previously, taking a single native from each one to fulfill their part in the plan: Za, the first of his cannibal race to achieve intelligence; Juliet, a fifteen-year-old girl from Kansas; and Whis'Par, the culmination of the artificial life Aknaton had created on the forest world.
Having gathered the three he needed, Aknaton returned to Byfrexia, where the icy sword had been found by a young Byfrexian named Vanth, who stumbled across it in the Arctic wilderness after ice bears devoured his family. The power of the sword preserved Vanth's life. In time, he came to find that it had other powers as well; it could absorb energy of almost any type and later redirect it as a destructive force; it gave Vanth great toughness and physical strength; it gave him the gift of tongues; and he was able to merge with the sword in a way unforeseen even by its maker, so the sword became a part of him that he could manifest at will. Vanth became obsessed with revenge, and spent many years hunting his world's ice bears nearly to extinction. The other Byfrexians, who depended on the bears for food, eventually leagued against Vanth and drove him offworld, where he spent some unspecified time as a mercenary. When the Zygoteans attacked Byfrexia, Vanth returned home and led resistance to them, becoming known as "The Cold Man".
Aknaton found Vanth and recruited him to be his pilot and bodyguard. Vanth leapt at the chance that there might be a plan to destroy the Zygoteans, though he was shaken when Aknaton revealed the exact nature of the plan to him and the others.
Aknaton had reasoned that since the Zygoteans were undefeatable, and the death of the galaxy could not be prevented, the only remaining kindness was to make the end as quick and painless as possible. He therefore created the Infinity Horn, whose purpose was to destroy the entire Milky Way. Appalled, but convinced that Aknaton's plan was the only option, Vanth and the others agreed. Fighting their way past an army of Zygoteans and their slaves (who had become aware of the plan and fought desperately to stop it), they returned to the cavern on the planet Dreamsend. As Aknaton and Vanth held off the Zygoteans outside, Za, Juliet, and Whis'Par entered the cavern and sounded the Infinity Horn, destroying the entire Milky Way in an instant.
The three who sounded the Horn were transformed into a new kind of being, carrying with them all that remained of the Milky Way, except for Aknaton and Vanth. Aknaton had used his mystic powers to encase himself and Vanth in a bubble of force and throw them into intergalactic space.
Eons later they crashed on a planet in another galaxy, where Vanth shot Aknaton in a fit of rage and guilt over the destruction of the Milky Way galaxy. Mortally wounded, Aknaton confessed that he had goaded Vanth into killing him because he could not live with the guilt. As he died, he told Vanth that he had saved him and brought him here because this galaxy was at a point where it might go down the same path as the Milky Way. Aknaton wanted Vanth to change the destiny of this new galaxy, and if he failed, to then locate the Infinity Horn to destroy this galaxy as well.
- He visited a world populated only by mindless cannibal beasts and introduced the potential for them to develop intelligence and compassion.
- He visited the planet Earth and encouraged the evolution of proto-humanity.
- He found an uninhabited forest-world and released proto-life of his own creation.
- He created a powerful artifact in the form of an icy sword and left it on the planet Byfrexia.
- The Osirosians created a mystical device, which they named the Infinity Horn, entrusted it to Aknaton who had it hidden in a cavern on a world called Dreamsend by an artificial immortal being he created in order to guard it until the time came to employ it.
