A fisherman named Uli is out before dawn preparing his nets for the day's fishing. It is 119,739 years before Burn's Sleep and Uli notices a blue-green smudge in the sky to the east. Throughout the morning's fishing the object in the sky gets bigger and brighter as it gets closer. Soon the great object breaks into shards filling the sky with blinding light and deafening noise. One shard hits the big island to the east while the others fall to ground in the west. The Crippled God has come to the Malazan world.