The Summer Tree begins in earnest with Gran's fantastic story of escaping the terror of Siberia in the early 1900s and passing through a gate to another world. The focus of her tale to come will be on her journey through this realm, the characters she meets, and the trials they face as they are drawn into its politics, poetry, and revolution.

Gran recounts her flight from the horrors of our world to this alien yet oddly familiar place. Her adventure begins in a dimly lit cell, where she meets Elena, a young girl with a mysterious past. Their uneasy alliance grows with the arrival of Nyssa, a girl who seems to be without a history. The confines of their cell “at the heart of the sun” set the stage for future connections and conflicts.

On Ayta’s seventh birthday, there came a knock on the door, and her namesake stood before her. Gran Ayta. Once a thing of myth, descended from legends. Now she seemed just a stooped old woman, but appearances can be deceiving.

Ayta’s lonely childhood was soon transformed by Gran’s fantastic stories of flight from one world to the next. From distant Siberia to the Second World of Alterran, from there to the very Land of the Dead she had come, or so she claimed. And she had returned with secrets taken from that underworld, to teach her granddaughter.

Seven years later, her Gran would be dead. Ayta had to come to terms with the legacy she had passed on to her, bearing these myths in a world which has no need for what it sees as childish things. A childish world that she knew was soon to end.