Imagine the Milky Way Galaxy. Zoom in until you see our solar system. Zoom in closer until you see Earth. Zoom in even closer until you see the Pacific Ocean, then a lone isolated island.

Rapa Nui, the navel of the world, is what they, the inhabitants, called the home that we refer to as Easter Island. After a thousand years of isolation, they believed they were the only people left on earth--that all other lands sank beneath the seemingly endless sea surrounding their isolated island.

The plot begins sometime before the first Europeans arrived. The inhabitants are divided into two factions: the...