19th century. A fictional provincial town in a fictional country. Quiet streets, dim lanterns, gossip, and prejudice—life flows slowly here. Until the first murder.

A local girl named Agnia—quiet, modest, an orphan—finds herself on the scaffold after a series of strange events. She is executed by guillotine.

But death is not the end.

After the execution, brutal killings begin to shake the town. Witnesses speak of a headless figure wandering in the darkness. Doctors report the victims' bodies are drained dry.

Albert—the chief of the local police, a graduate from the capital, stranded in the backwoods—tries to find a rational explanation. But the evidence leads where reason refuses to look.