The souls of the dead are real, immortal - and escaping in billions from the Beyond to possess the living, dragging whole planets out of the cosmos in their quest to find the heaven denied them in this universe. But the dead are also discovering they're making a terrible and terrifying mistake...

This realization won't save the 900-world Confederation from shattering into anarchy. The military campaign to exorcise just one small colony has strained Confederation resources to the utmost. Desperate to survive, richer worlds are preparing to sacrifice the rest of humanity to the Possessed.

And some of the newly undead souls are making a bad situation worse. Using antimatter weapons and Possessed sentient ships, the resurrected Al Capone is expanding his empire in this realm. The satanist messiah Quinn Dexter also stalks the Earth. Dexter doesn't want heaven, or conquest, or simple revenge. He wants to conjure the Night's Dawn-the absolute entropic annihilation of all Creation, all space/time, all everything.

Meanwhile, two starships containing the living have entered unexplored space. Joshua Calvert, master of the Lady Macbeth, and Edenist pilot Syrinx are searching for a last hope, a miracle in the cosmic haystack. All they know is that 15,000 years ago the alien Tyrathca received a single message from somewhere beyond Orion:

"IT SEES THE UNIVERSE. IT CONTROLS EXISTENCE. OUR ARRIVAL WOKE IT."

There's no clue to what the message really means, what or where the Tyrathca God is... Joshua Calvert may be charming, and he has been cursed with the devil's own luck - but surely luck can't conceivably be enough to help him find and get help from a dormant God, even as reality is being devoured by the Night's Dawn...