All was well until the Lady of the Lake again appeared, this time to say a prophecy: A year will come when stars go dark, and faith will fail anon; For born shall be a child who spells the end of Avalon; The only hope beneath the stars to save that world so fair, will be the Merlin then alive, the wizard's own true heir; What shall become of Avalon, our dream, our deepest need?What glory or despair shall sprout from Merlin's magic seed?

During the foretold Dark Year, the majority of creatures in Avalon forbade childbirth, killing all children born in spite of the moratorium.

A drought appears in realms Olanabram, Brynchilla, and El Urien; humans become anthropocentric and arrogant; and the stars in the Wizard's Staff are again darkening, one by one.

Characters Tamwyn, Elli, Nuic, Henni, Llynia, and later Batty Lad, must journey to the Lady of the Lake to find out what is happening, and how they can stop it.

Eventually, it is revealed that a sorcerer, Kulwych or White Hands, a servant of the evil spirit Rhita Gawr, has dammed the river that sustains the three realms named above with the sole purpose of collecting enough of the water, which has élano, a powerful life-giving substance, to produce a pure and powerful crystal.