A man who has lived alone in a cave for years wakes one morning and decides to leave. He gives away what he owns and walks west, to find the man he once pulled from a dry well and then abandoned.

He finds him still living beside the well — burned, remembering almost nothing: falling, fire, shame, the feeling of being trapped, and nothing before it. He doesn't know how he came to the well, or why he is so afraid of the place he fled. As they talk, even the well turns uncertain. Perhaps he never fell into it. Perhaps, the caveman tells him, he was the well. Whatever happened is still somewhere inside him, so they set out together to find it.

The road leads to Nun, a walled city of priestesses and old dynasties, where an old man knows the burned stranger by his eyes and calls him Adam. His family is alive — a mother who wants back the son she lost, a father whose approval he spent his childhood failing to earn. They remember him happy; he remembers wanting to escape. Everyone remembers a different Adam. There is Mara, the woman he was to marry; Asha, her younger sister, now a priestess, who loved him and says they had planned to leave together; Ada, whom he remembers only in fragments, gone before the fire; and Magus — the childhood friend who adored him and now hates him. Each gives Adam a piece of himself. None gives him the whole, and the past gets worse rather than clearer.

While Adam searches, the caveman climbs the temple and finds a boy living alone at the top: Soranla, last male child of the fallen dynasty — a political problem to the priesthood, a future king to the old Order, a lonely child to the caveman. When the boy asks if someone will stay with him, the caveman asks if he wants to leave. That pulls the private story into the political one. The old Order spirits Soranla away to crown him; soldiers of Nun's Mother Priestess break in before the crown touches his head, and she orders the temple burned to the ground. Fire takes another structure people have filled with history.

Eventually Magus tells Adam what happened the night of the fire. He had learned that Adam and Asha meant to leave together — he had loved Asha for years and watched her love his friend. Something broke. He threw burning wood through Adam's window, barred the doors, and watched through the smoke, lifting the bar only at the last moment. Adam came out burning and ran into the dark. The thing Adam crossed the world to remember was not a curse or a conspiracy: a frightened young man hurt another because he felt abandoned and unloved. Remembering it heals neither of them.

They cross the Unknown to Mu, home of the Illuminated, who drink a water laced with tiny blue lights that slowly takes their memories — a place, then a reason, then a face, then a name. Most are glad to forget. Mu offers the opposite of everything Adam has been doing: stop carrying it. Ada is there; so is Bugata, the gardeners' teacher; and a hidden second fountain whose water returns memory, which the writer Kushim secretly drinks, because someone must keep what the others let go. The caveman drinks the ordinary water and forgets — directions, then why he came, then the name of the man he pulled from the well. In an initiation meant to empty him, Bugata strips him to nothing and gives him a new name: Adam. The lost friend's name breaks through. He remembers the man in the well, and refuses it.

By now every way of explaining a person is failing — family, memory, religion, history, myth, the state, a lover, a parent; none false, none enough. Beneath them runs an older layer: myths that have forgotten where they came from — the descent, the emergence, the eight-pointed star, serpents and bulls and buried worlds — which the characters walk through without knowing, and which keep turning out to be the machinery of the people themselves.

The roads converge on Mount Hu, at a dry fountain inside a stone maze: seven men and one boy, carrying different memories and different beliefs about death. They argue; the boy watches the fire. Then the old man Dier dies, and the men begin deciding what his death means. Soranla says, twice, that they should bury him there; no one hears him until Magus does. Rain falls through the open roof and fills the dry fountain around the body. The men make a fire; hail kills it, and when it goes out the huge shadows leave the walls — no one is twice his own size anymore. The hail becomes snow. Soranla walks out first and turns his face up, and the men follow, and for once no one explains.

Then comes The Beginning. The book opened — in a chapter called The End — with a grown man waking in a cave. It closes with a boy waking in his body. We are never told his name; adults answer for him. We follow him through one ordinary day: he looks into a well, follows other children, gets jealous, gets hurt, gives away a toy, sees fires and snakes and stars and old images he cannot read. The myths that carried the whole novel are still everywhere around him; he just doesn't know they are myths. He finds a frightened child crying by a fountain — Magus, not yet the man who will burn a house, just a boy — and they invent a story and make each other laugh until the adults lead them back. That night, carried up and left alone, he lies on the terrace with a cloth rabbit on his chest. He puts his thumb over the moon and takes it away. Out, back, out, back. He breathes with the rabbit, sings a small melody he heard that day, and sleeps.

EMERGENCE begins with a man leaving a cave to understand what happened to him. It ends much further back — with a child feeling the world before memory, fear, mythology and other people have finished telling him what it means.