"Knowledge is power, David, we must guard it well. ... [Solomon] was not simply collecting the books for their monetary value ... he was collecting them for their inhumanly massive social and intellectual power. Solomon feared these books. He feared what people, reading them, might do." David is born to two mothers in two different worlds. His first mother exists only in the world of myth and history, a barely remembered figure cursed by God. David inhabits this other world in his dreams. Between his dreams and the surreal empire which Solomon, his guardian, is building for him, David struggles to break his myth-mother's curse.