A young girl lost in the loneliness and boredom of reality finds solace in an ill boy, whom she can visit in a surreal dream world that she drew in her school composition book.

A lighthouse guardian leads a young prince towards an imaginary world, Taxandria, where the boy learns about the power of love and the value of liberty. A totalitarian regime has forbidden time: time watches have been confiscated, photo cameras are illegal as they freeze a point in time. A typical Servais theme: a power is oppressed by a constraint that denies what is best in the individual, and therefore has to be twisted in various ways, to establish an entirely artificial world, that has rules that may question some of the rules of our world at this side of the mirror.

On the whole, giants are benign creatures, harmless to none, unless of course the giant hasn't a heart. A curious prince is fooled into freeing one such heartless giant from the king's dungeon.