A young man named Arkady lives with his friend Giacomo, who is like a brother to him, and their dog Leporello in an apartment. They live in a place where the tyrant king drowns people in the river when they anger him, which happens often. Both of Arkady’s parents were killed this way, and he woke up one day as a child to find that he was alone. Recently, Arkady threw a key into a fire as part of a plan to kidnap the tyrant’s daughter.

The daughter, known as both Eirini the Second and Eirini the Fair, was named after her mother. Eirini the First was almost stoned to death because the child looked nothing like the tyrant and much more like a man her mother loved but had never even spoken to. The man came to the execution to vouch for Eirini the First, and she was spared. However, when the man asked to see the child, the tyrant denied the request and drowned him. The tyrant had executed so many people by this point that houses stood empty and the marshlands surrounding the kingdom were full of human remains and house keys.