Our story begins in the year of 1990; the Berlin Wall has just fallen, communism has collapsed and for the first time since the Roman Empire, Yugoslavia finds itself a free nation.

Young and impressionable Serdjan joins some of his friends in a Serbian Militia Unit and eventually finds himself in the hills outside of Sarajevo firing mortar shells nightly in the city ("I Am").

Meanwhile, in Sarajevo itself, Katrina Brasic, a young Muslim girl, finds herself buying weapons from a group of arms merchants and then joining her comrades firing in the hills around the city ("Starlight", "Doesn't Matter Anyway").

As the season's first snowfall begins, he stands in the town square, looks toward the heavens and explains that when the Yugoslavians prayed for change, this is not what they intended ("This Isn't What We Meant").

As the old man finishes his prayer, the sun begins to set and the first shells of the evening's artillery barrage are starting to arc overhead.

But instead of heading for the shelters with the rest of the civilians, he climbs atop the rubble that used to be the fountain and taking out his cello, starts to play Mozart as the shells explode around him.

One day in late December, Serdjan on a patrol in Sarajevo, comes across a schoolyard where a recent exploding shell has left the ground littered with the bodies of young children.

It had just stopped snowing and the clouds had given way to reveal a beautiful star-filled sky when suddenly the cellos player's music abruptly ceases.

Fearing the worst, Serdjan and Katrina both do something quite foolish and from their respectives sides, start to make their ways across no man's land toward the town square.

[3] In a contemporary review, Matthias Breusch of Rock Hard magazine remarked how the album is the band's "most significant move so far in the direction of classical-symphonic bombast compositions" with "piano and string arrangements (...) omnipresent", even if "dedicated fans" would miss the "fine line between genius and madness, on which the interaction of the two Oliva brothers up to and including Edge of Thorns has driven every Savatage album."

He judged "the instrumentals 'Overture: Sarajevo', 'Mozart and Madness' and 'Christmas Eve'" and the quieter numbers, "like the exquisite 'This Is Not What We Meant', 'Now What You See', 'This Is the Time' or 'One Child'", the true highlights of the album, while he considered the title track "somewhat lethargic" and the uptempo songs "mediocre".