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Ten millennia had passed since the creation of the Beasts, and those ten thousand years had obliterated the original purpose of Adam December and the construct surgeons.

Ten millennia had passed since the word WAR was forgotten and remembered; and that word wiped out ten thousand years of peaceful coexistence.

Ten millennia, one thousand decades, ten thousand years... and for the first time Humans and Beasts were dying throughout the galaxy.

But it should have been expected: man had created the Beasts in his own image, and unfortunately, the Beasts were just like him.

The first of the brilliant science fiction trilogy of the Dies Irae, by the talented author of CRADLE OF THE SUN.

Mark Chaos was a long way from home. He had spent many years fighting in the Beast war, which had begun as an affair to honor but ended in a bloodbath for all the Humans of the House of Stars. Yet Beasts and Humans were exactly alike - except that ten thousand years before the Beasts had originated from zoological gene banks under the deft hands of the construct surgeons.

The war was a terrible thing, even more terrible because its leaders never knew they were being tricked and guided by one man - a man who came from a universe which no longer existed. He was Heljanita the Toymaker, who spun a crooked wheel that distorted minds and dimensions.

And Heljanita was particularly interested in Mark Chaos.

Humans and beasts alike were licking their wounds after the bloodiest battle in cosmic history. They had been pawns-puppets whose strings had been pulled by a cruel master: Heljanita the Toymaker.

Heljanita had used what he considered to be the deadliest weapon-a ten thousand year distortion of time. His purpose: to obliterate a world he'd hated.

But his new world was a powder-keg. For two of his victims, stranded in time, were determined to fight back.

Time, as before, was manipulated, twisted, bent and perverted... up to a point.