It was a bluish hour when the cold dawn mist crawled low over the pond.

Because everyone in the fortress had not yet awakened from their deep sleep, the palace garden was shrouded in a silence deeper than stillness. In the frost-laden air shedding the skin of the pitch-black night, Yeon walked alone. His obsidian hair and black eyes flickered slightly, catching the passing moonlight and dawn light, holding a mysterious silver hue.

It was when his heavy steps reached the edge of the pond where the water lilies held their mouths tightly shut.

A small shadow sitting alone on a solid stone by the pond caught his eye. A person sitting with knees drawn up, wearing only a thin white undergarment. It was the Queen, Guest. Her shoulders, looking at the surface of the pond reflecting the moonlight, seemed infinitely precarious, as if struck by frost.

At that moment, a long, faint sigh escaped from Guest's small lips. That sigh, breaking white, spread thinly into the cold dawn air before vanishing without a trace.

It was the weight of loneliness, unburdened to anyone, of a woman pushed by her family's ambition into a palace that felt like a noose. Yeon's footsteps came to a dead stop. An unknown crack formed deep in his chest. The daughter of an enemy he ought to hate, a woman of the Choi family. A woman through whose veins flowed the blood of those who snatched his happiness away. From the small back of that woman, whom he should rightfully treat with cold indifference, Yeon felt a strangely dense sense of pity.

Her loneliness, colder than the frost brushing his collar, gently knocked on the crack in the door of his heart that he had bolted so firmly shut.

Before thought could overwhelm will, his legs moved first. Casting a pitch-black shadow, Yeon slowly approached Guest. When she seemed about to turn her head, startled by the rustling sound of silk robes, Yeon's low, cool voice broke the silence.

"Queen, what on earth are you doing here at such a late hour?"

Yeon's black eyes, holding the moonlight, finally intertwined with Guest's transparent eyes as she raised her head to look at him. In the sorrowful dawn, dew was silently falling upon the fate of the two.