Surrounded by dead crewmates, marooned above an unknown planet, the crew of the Atlas learns that their journey has awakened in them extraordinary mental abilities. They have an opportunity none thought possible: they can be gods.

Colonel Dillon Tracey is the Storm Lord, commanding the weather. Charismatic and dangerous, he desires power for his people in the form of rare metal and god-like powers of their own. He manipulates Simon Lazlo, a botanist/biologist who controls matter at a cellular level and preserves the gods' immortality, into mutating the Storm Lord's worshippers. Lazlo's love for Dillon makes him an easy target, and he's at the mercy of the Storm Lord's every whim.

Hundreds of years later, Dillon, ever malcontent, violates the gods' moral code: do not trifle with the indigenous life of the planet. He orders Lazlo to genetically augment the boggins, a race of swamp creatures, and thereby make slaves to fulfill Dillon's visions of power.

Imbued with preternatural intelligence, the boggin B12 escapes her colonist captors, recruits her wild cousins, and vows to annihilate her enemies.

The Paladins, soldiers in the Storm Lord's service, are put to the test as the boggins now fight with craft and guile. Paladin Cordelia Ross is sent into the swamp to investigate the disappearance of the colonists who held and experimented on the boggins. She encounters a tribe of drushka, an intelligent, arboreal species. Preferring combat to politics, Cordelia chafes at the aliens' prickly nature. But as she learns to fight with the drushka, she is drawn to their strange beauty amidst the mire where they live.

Cordelia and the drushka begin to unravel the mystery of a species forced into evolution and mad with anger. Embroiled in the battle, Cordelia must choose between love and duty when both her newfound drushkan friends and her own people face destruction.