Amaranta Vesper, Warden of the Northern March, is a queen whose beauty is like a honed blade, her heart sealed tight in an icy shell of post-war trauma. She has turned hyper-control into an art form, ruling the state with an iron hand and considering any display of emotion or mercy a fatal weakness. But every night, this bastion of will crumbles in the same nightmare — standing blindfolded on a battlefield, she hears the screams of her fallen family and cannot move. The court whispers of an insomnia curse, never suspecting that the Queen drowns her horror in work and secret nightly patrols through the palace's cold corridors. Her only rebellion against herself is the charcoal drawings in the margins of state decrees, where instead of strategic maps, broken lines emerge, resembling mass graves. And when a daring street thief offers her not obedience, but music, she finds herself facing an impossible choice — to admit that even the Warden of the March needs someone to play her a lullaby.