It is 80AD. After winning a string of victories against greatly superior odds, the Roman centurion Vitellan is approached and offered a chance to gain power beyond his wildest dreams if he joins a secretive sect called the Temporians. Vitellan refuses the offer, explaining that he is in love and soon to be married.

On a visit to his home estate in Britain, however, he discovers that Flavia, his lover, has jilted him. Vitellan accepts the offer, and is taken high into the Alps to the Via Tempus, where the greatest minds that ever lived are kept alive for when they are needed. In the Via Tempus Vitellan is taught about the Oil of Frosts, which allows people to be frozen and safely revived. By way of initiation, Vitellan is given the oil to drink, and then frozen for twenty years.

In 100AD Vitellan is revived and told why a breakaway group of Temporians, the Goth masters, are attacking Rome. They wish to rule the world and for the past century the Goth masters have been winning. Vitellan is to build an elite squad of warriors and fight the Goth masters.

Vitellan, the hooded woman, the physician Marcus, and the engineer Katrius travel to Britain, where they set up an ice chamber in an old tin mine. The Icekeeper is appointed as a high priest of the freezing process. Before being frozen Vitellan establishes a tradition of fanatical martial arts training. After fifty years the four Temporians are revived. By now the Villagers are some of the best warriors in the Roman Empire. They return to the Alps, and learn that the Goth masters have nearly won, the Temporians have fled, and Rome will soon fall. The world will be fragmented into barbarian tribes forever.

The hooded woman, the spy in Vitellan’s group, learns where the Goth masters have their own ice powered time machine, in the Alps. They attack under Vitellan’s command, defeating the guards, and flooding the Goth masters’ ice chambers. Vitellan and his people quietly slip away back to Britain and Durvonium, to sleep in their own ice chamber until they are needed to fight the Goth masters again.

Rome is saved in 150AD, but enough Goth masters survive to continue to be a threat against the Temporians and the Roman Empire. Vitellan and his three Temporian allies are repeatedly refrozen, then revived to fight the Goth masters as Rome falls in 410AD, repel Viking attacks led by Goth masters in 870AD, and even to frustrate the attempts of the few surviving Goth masters to lead peasant rebellions to shatter the kingdoms of the Middle Ages. Gradually they reduce the ranks of the Goth masters, but at a price. Ultimately only Vitellan is left, standing against the most dangerous Goth master of all amid the glitter and danger of the Twenty First Century. He is never totally alone, however. There are always the Icekeepers, who have become fanatically dedicated to his survival over the centuries that they have tended his frozen body.