After his whirlwind summer adventures in Bespri, Ben is happy to settle down with his new family, but he isn’t looking forward to going to Sprucevale’s high school, where no one would believe him if he revealed how he spent the summer. Also, there are signs that Emperor Kantab, far from giving up, is hatching new schemes that might endanger Ben and his family as well as Caldae. However, the valiant Guardian Fellows, whose mastery of magic enabled them to defeat the superior force of the Feyren army and the Imperial Dragoons in the summer accept Ben and into the famed Guardian Academy, where they find the training to be just as tough and thorough as it is reputed to be. As the only Earthan in their class, Ben struggles with the magic training but manages to do better than he expected—until a disastrous final test. Returning home with a heavy heart, he discovers that the Feyrens have finally struck.

No sooner has Ben returned home on leave from the Guardian Academy than he discovers that Feyren Emperor Kantab’s forces are on the move again and after his parents. To save them, Mizli and Ben thread their way through a maze of lies and captivity by bogus government “agents." When they eventually discover that a human schemer, secretly in league with the Emperor, is behind the kidnapping, Mizli conceives of a brilliant ploy to unmask him. However, the Emperor’s reach is long, and Ben and Mizli find they must deal with Feyr’s almost invincible Imperial Dragoons before they can save Ben's folks. Even if they do, they still must return to Caldae and face the consequences of their disastrous performance on their final examination at the Guardian Academy.

The Battle Between Good & Evil Continues While Emperor Kantab mobilizes his vast army to attack Caldae, Mizli decides to attempt to rescue Ben. After some timely advice from the mysterious Vedleese, she secretly leaves Caldae on the seemingly hopeless mission. And there’s more to Mizli’s plan. She will need Ben’s help in getting past squads of nearly invincible Imperial Dragoons to find a heavily-guarded prisoner and extract him from the Emperor’s Palace. If they succeed, they must take an even more desperate risk to prevent the ruthless Emperor from conquering both Mizli’s peaceful Caldae and Ben’s unsuspecting Earth.

Good or evil — which is more powerful? Ben Scott, a reasonably typical American teen, unwittingly steps across a dimensional boundary into a magical world. There he meets Mizli, a lovely and exotically dusky young sprite and finds himself thrust suddenly into the middle of a deadly contest for supremacy between light and dark magic. Telling him that he is in the world of Bespri, Mizli explains that Bespri's Oracle has prophesized that magic is going to be turned toward the light magic of her country, Caldae, and away from the dark realm of Feyr. Before he can absorb this mind-bending information, Ben is captured by agents of Feyr and taken to their powerful and charismatic Emperor who gives Ben an entirely different picture of the rivalry between the two realms. After a series of magical adventures in Feyr, Mizli's Camelot-like Caldae, and Earth, time runs out, and Ben must make a choice that will have a profound effect on the land of magic and his own family as well.

Finally, Emperor Kantab’s schemes have been thwarted in both Ben’s and Mizli’s worlds. With relief, the teens settle down to concentrate on their Guardian training as they begin their post-graduate term at the Academy. However, they have barely started the term when they learn that the wily Emperor is hatching an even more sinister plot to regain dominance. This both complicates and accelerates the Academy's already intense advanced training for them, and keeps them too busy to do any sleuthing for clues to what Kantab up to, When, at last, they get the opportunity to investigate, they daringly try walking through a mysterious portal and find themselves lost in a mind-warping Vortex of Magic. They race through a bewildering time maze to unravel the Emperor’s diabolically clever plan prevent him from restoring Feyr’s dominance of magic and spreading Feyr’s fearful rule over all of Bespri and Earth.