One evening at summer's end, in a town where nomads and caravans prepare to cross the mountains, the day laborer Sado meets a young woman with a painfully familiar tattoo at the corner of her eye. The two are drawn to each other by a shared history of rebellion and exile, and the mysterious woman begins to share her tale. It is a story of expulsion, forced resettlement, and the sainted creature that came to rule the woman's fate: dervish, djinn, or maybe something more monstrous. As the woman's tale unfurls, Sado is further entangled in its warp and weft, even as it grows clear that his companion's nature has been touched by the same hungry force of which she speaks. With the past bleeding into the present, the two must face a power as vast and overwhelming as the night¿-¿one that threatens not only their lives, but the very shapes of their selves.