The Dragons of the Storm continues onward from The Weight of Smoke, the first volume of the In the Land of Whispers trilogy. While the old alchemist and mariner, Jonas Profit, relates the tales of Queen Elizabeth's pirate, Francis Drake -- whose circumnavigation of the world, and sinki ng of the Spanish Armada, enabled the English to envision a colonial empire -- John Smith dedicates the year of his presidency toward form ing a new society with the surviving colonists, until his authority is stripped from him by his enemies, and he is forced to confront the legacies of Drake, Powhatan, and Roanoke.