Laurentius Hylas, a young student sporting a suitcase and a curious parrot, arrives in wintry Estonia at the end of the 17th century. Fleeing from a dark past and suspicions of heresy, he makes his way to Tartu, the "City of Muses". In this scientific and philosophical environment that would ultimately lead to the Age of Enlightenment, Laurentius searches obsessively for a cure for the illness that plagues him and which his contemporaries call melancholy - a depression. But the more he concerns himself with questions he cannot answer - Where does the soul come from? What is the relationship between it and the body? - the more he is drawn to the world of superstition and the remedies of the farmers in the countryside. A world he knew as a child, one in which he took part in witch hunts, a world that haunts him in dreams and visions. A world that he fears and that begins to merge with reality.
 
Friedenthal delves deep into the Middle Ages to tell of the emergence of a new age of reason. A time when modern medicine is carving its way through fears and the old belief in alchemy. The dark north dreams of a radiant antiquity and the harmony of a world that can might be healed by a longing for light, gold, and honey.