Yesugei, khan of the Wolves, destroys a Tartar raiding party in a blizzard and rides home to find his second son being born, the infant's fist closed around a black clot of blood. His mother reads it as a life shadowed by death. His father declares he will be iron and names him Temüjin. Years lat...

Yesugei takes Temüjin across the steppe to find him a bride, and over days on the trail a distant father and a guarded son grow close. Among the Olkhun'ut the boy is betrothed to the fierce Borte and left behind to prove himself. Riding home alone, Yesugei is surrounded by Tartars who honor guest...

Temüjin races home and reaches his father in time for a last word before Yesugei is gone. At the funeral fire the bondsman Eeluk claims the tribe by force and blood, and Hoelun and her children are stripped of everything and driven onto the empty plain, left to starve as the carrion birds circle.

The abandoned family claws at survival, Hoelun breaking her wedding keepsakes into fishhooks to keep them alive. When the domineering Bekter hoards food while the others go hungry, Temüjin makes a cold and final choice. The act keeps them alive and nearly costs him his mother's love, and it revea...

Now a young man who has kept his family alive in the wild, Temüjin is hunted down by Eeluk's brutal enforcer Tolui. In a running fight he draws the killers away from his brothers and is spared by an old loyalist who looks him dead in the eye and lies. Taken prisoner, Temüjin is forced to witness ...

A prisoner of the man who destroyed his family, Temüjin survives torment in a freezing pit and a desperate escape beneath the blue river ice. Sheltered in secret and set free, he reunites with the brother who never stopped waiting and takes the oath of his first bondsmen. As the usurper drinks ea...