FRANKIE FRETINI has had a horrible year. And, just when he thinks things are looking up, well...all heck breaks loose. It happens in home-ec class just moments after the girl of his dreams, Jenny Moran, invites him to the annual town carnival. Still dazed from the unexpected invite, Frankie accidentally plasters the face of school bully, Brick McDuddy, with a giant scoop of chocolate mousse. Embarrassed, and fuming mad, Brick plots to deliver his painful revenge at the carnival. When Frankie, and his pals, Sam, Beef, and Bookworm show up to meet Jenny, Brick and his nasty bootlickers, Harold "The Horrible" Dunson and Billy "Scat" Pile, chase them into the eerie tent of an old Gypsy fortuneteller named Mala. Trapped with nowhere to run, Frankie makes a pact with Mala not knowing that he and his pals would be swept through her crystal ball to Medieval Italy. Now, their only hope to return home rests in Frankie's hands. He must kill the evil Italian witch, Il Strega Diavolo, and rescue Mala's twin sister, Tsura. But, can Frankie find the courage to face the Strega?
In the woods south of the capital, a man born of magic wakes after a long sleep to experience his first taste of tragedy. Broken by the loss of one who cared for him, he becomes a monster he's never transformed into before. When he wakes up, a small rabbit-girl who calls herself a beast-bunny and a young man that smells of fear have cleaned the blood from his hands. Others' blood. But when he leaves them to mourn his caretaker and cope with the lives he has taken, he is shown the truth of his being. As a guardian called a Stag, he must venture into the world and make it better, but he will need to find the ones who helped him first.
The nameless one has never ventured outside of the woods before and, in his attempt to locate those he searches for, is arrested. It seems the capital believes them to be murderers, and if not for the intervention of a captain who knows what he is, Nameless might have failed his quest before beginning it. By the help of a demon, he reunites with those who cared for him in the woods, and he starts the seemingly impossible task of discovering what exactly happened to turn his companions into criminals and save them if he can.
If he cannot, he will have lost his first friends and the only ones he has come to trust to help him save their lands' magic and heal the world he finds falling apart all around him.