Soulmates Eric and Shelly are brutally murdered when the demons of her dark past catch up with them. Given the chance to save his true love by sacrificing himself, Eric sets out to seek merciless revenge on their killers, traversing the worlds of the living and the dead to put the wrong things right.

The calm and peaceful lives of two young widows - cousins Karolina and Anežka, who live together on a countryside estate - is suddenly stirred up by an unexpected visitor. It becomes obvious that the mysterious poacher, who suddenly appears in the estate’s forest, is not out hunting for a doe but rather pining for one of them. At the beginning of the 1870s, Smetana faced a rising number of challenges to his position of artistic director of Prague’s opera ensemble. From this tense and pressured period for the composer sprang a work of immense creative grace. He seems to delight in evoking a world of people of refined manners, fine culture and the gentle atmosphere of a rural estate. Perhaps it was a relief from life's difficulties and an escape from everyday dullness - a kind of summer fairy tale with a happy end.