Having already written several books, Yep had wanted to adapt Chinese mythology into a fantasy form for some time, and began writing the story in 1980 after undertaking careful research.

He had originally intended to adapt a Chinese folktale in which the Monkey King captured a river spirit who had flooded an entire city, which he at first tried to conceive in picture book form.

[2] Shimmer, an exiled dragon princess traveling incognito in human form, senses powerful magic emanating from a small village.

Shimmer soon encounters a young, orphaned kitchen servant named Thorn who is being harassed by the local children because he claims to have seen the mythical Unicorn, one of the Five Masters.

She visits Thorn at the inn out of gratitude, and accepts his offer of a meal and a place to stay for the night, having never met with such hospitality during all her years of exile.

To escape, Shimmer uses the dream pearl, a treasure which she was exiled for supposedly stealing hundreds of years ago, to change into her true form as a dragon in order fly away with Thorn.

Pursued by the Keeper and his pets for hours, Shimmer manages to defeat them in an aerial battle near her former home, the Lost Sea, but her wing is injured and she is forced to land.

Monkey welcomes Shimmer and Thorn, but drugs their tea, putting them to sleep to prevent them from interfering with his plan to apprehend Civet singlehandedly.

Before he can subdue her, she manages to unleash the waters of the Lost Sea by destroying the blue pebble, leaving River Glen nearly totally submerged.

It took her a thousand years to learn enough magic from him to be able to turn him into a stone and escape, by which time River Glen had been transformed from a village into a prosperous, industrial city which had grown wealthy from its trade with the dragons of the Inland Sea.

Shimmer decides that the chain disabling Civet can be removed for any help she can give in restoring the Lost Sea, but she will need to journey to the dragon kingdoms in search of Monkey or a powerful mage.