Young Fanya and her grandmother Simone, the healer, find a strange human-like creature named Sharduk lying wounded and unconscious on the beach. Simone recognises him as a spirit of the waters and she and Fanya try to save his life. When he wakes up, Sharduk tells them about Telluria, the world he came from, and how he travelled to our world through the mysterious "crossing zones." Fanya and Sharduk soon fall in love, but he has to leave her, swearing that he will return with a way for them to pass through the underwater "crossing" together. This is the start of an epic story of adventure, love, African magic and science fiction.