Andre Toulon, living a peaceful life as a puppeteer in pre-WWI Paris, encounters the renegade sorcerer Afzel, who has stolen the mysterious secrets of life from the dark god Sutekh.
Beowulf is a wanderer who learns about a man-eating creature called Grendel, which comes in the night to devour warriors trapped at the Outpost. The Outpost is ruled by Hrothgar. He has a daughter, whose husband may have been murdered by the Outpost's master of arms.
A solitary mountain man finds a young woman who has been beaten and abandoned in the woods. He makes her the object of his passion, but her dark past catches up on them.