In "Image in the Sand", three months after leaving Deep Space Nine, Sisko has a vision of a living female human face buried in the sand of a desert planet. Obsessed with learning her identity he uncovers some disturbing secrets from his own past and provokes an attack which puts him on the wrong end of an assassin's blade. In "Shadows and Symbols" Sisko, following his vision from the Prophets, travels to the desert planet of Tyree in his search for the crucial Orb of the Emissary. On finding the artefact, his actions unleash both future consequences and some far-reaching explanations of the past.