In a small town near the front, Seryoga, a weary father, tries to stop his son Sashko from joining the war. His partner, Marianca, longs to escape but is trapped by love and circumstance. Vera, their neighbour, grieves a daughter killed in the fighting. And Nadya, a young girl who plays at being a Cossack, becomes the play’s conscience: child, witness and keeper of myth. As the family fractures, myth and reality blur. Sashko and Nadya imagine heroic Cossacks riding through the steppe, even as civilians are killed and homes collapse around them. Language itself fractures; the names of things change daily. The Cossack past collides with a war-torn present, as Sashko, the idealist, confronts Dmitry, the hardened soldier, two sides of a nation at war. Nadya, wounded but unbroken, becomes the bearer of a new myth: one that refuses disappearance and insists that the land keeps what’s good.