Bylur Hunter, the young King of the Winter Palace. The King with a interest in yoga and silence.

Snow whispered against the crystal windows of the Winter Palace, piling in soft, endless drifts. Inside, the throne room was silent, so silent that even the ice seemed to breathe. Bylur Hunter stood alone at its center, his bare feet gripping the frozen marble floor as he balanced upside down on one palm. His short white hair brushed the cold stone, his body moving with the control and grace of someone who had practiced the motion a thousand times.

He liked the way the silence bent around him when he moved, how the empty halls echoed only with the sound of his breath. Gymnastics and yoga were the only companions he had known since the age of two, since the night his parents’ voices vanished into the snowstorm and never returned. He couldn’t remember their faces, only the weight of their absence.

Bylur had been king for as long as he could remember, yet a king of what? The courtiers were gone. The servants were gone. Even the books that lined the frost-bitten library meant nothing to him; their curling letters were an indecipherable maze he’d never been able to navigate. Reading was a mystery, a world locked behind marks on paper.

And so, day after day, he trained. He twisted, balanced, bent, and breathed, each motion carving a little more mastery into his lonely body. Human interaction had become a distant, half-forgotten concept—an echo in a palace of ice.

But that morning, as a shadow passed across the frozen courtyard, Bylur felt the stillness shift. For the first time in years, the Winter Palace had a visitor.