Together for the first time: Mary Gentle's classic tales of Orthe: Golden Witchbreed and Ancient Light, and the short story The Crystal Sunlight, the Bright Air.

The distant world of Orthe is littered with spectacular remnants of the Golden Empire, an ancient and technologically advanced civilisation extinct for two thousand years.

Now their Orthean descendants have turned away from the technology which nearly destroyed them, and from anything that links them with their past, and with their ancestors, the Golden Witchbreed.