Spring spilled its colors and perfumes across the kingdom, and Irethis, the majestic yellowish moon, cast its light over the slumbering lands. But for Helena, the queen isolated in the dungeons of the Jade Palace, that beauty was a distant specter. The world had become gray, lifeless; it was as if the light, the colors, and the kingdom's fragrances belonged to another plane of existence, one where her soul no longer dwelled.