Imagine a land in its mythic age, a time before sprawling civilization and social order. Imagine a time of unabated nature, where small settlements pop up only by the land’s allowance. This is Vedmora, a place where magic is suffused into every plant and animal; where regions are ruled by witch queens and their brutal covens. Ah, but power has its price, and every twist of magic causes a witch to age, sapping away at her youth until she can literally crumble into dust.

Twenty years ago, a witch coven developed a means to use magic without sacrificing their age by drawing from the land, itself. Yielding a strange dust, this dross allowed people to cast even the most potent of spells without aging a single day. The coven took on students, for the first time in history giving laymen the tools to wield power that rivaled the witch queens across Vedmora. They conjured a tower, stretching toward the heavens, that would serve as a school. But then the witches vanished, abandoning their students and leaving nothing behind save for an infant boy.

Dross is the story of that boy, Galaeryon, who has now grown into a young man. Trained in the art of this material magic, he sets out on a journey from the College of Skyspire to investigate a mysterious comet falling from the sky in the far north. To do so, he will have to traverse the territories of the myriad witch queens of Vedmora and pray that his lineage will grant him favor with their eldritch customs. On his way, he finds companionship in a satyr named Emerick, a journeyman witch hunter, and the bear Anyiltha, a powerful witch and warden of her forest. The lures of love, power, and the question of truth challenge Galaeryon on his quest where he, more than anything, hopes to find the witch that abandoned him in that tower all those years ago.