Gathering Blue is set in a non-specific, dystopian (anti-utopian) future. Sometime in the distant past, a terrible catastrophe has occurred, forcing a once socially and technologically advanced civilization into a rapid disintegration that the people in Kira's village call the "Ruin." Fragments of that civilization survive in small, isolated enclaves of simple, superstitious people ruled by local oligarchic (governed by few) "Councils," whose primary task is to preserve a memory of the past and to guide the future of their people. It is in one of these enclaves that the action of Gathering Blue takes place.

Gathering Blue begins in the "Field of Leaving," as Kira awaits the "diggers" who will come to bury her mother once her mother's spirit has been given sufficient time to exit her body. The setting is a medieval-like village, isolated from the rest of the world by a dense and forbidding forest...