You Are My Guest

Snow falls over Jiankang, where countless palace towers stand and a lonely lamp shines in the cold night.

The Jin dynasty is on the brink of collapse, and war fires rage across a fractured land. The young emperor, Yun Xuan, returns from Northern Yan in bloodstained white robes, stars hidden in his eyes. He bears the ambition to put the realm before himself, wielding the imperial axe as he takes his place upon the Nine Tripods. He vows to burn away the clans' corruption and restore peace and prosperity to the people. But political intrigue is an abyss, and every step brings death: he kneels in the snow before the palace for three days; loyal bones lie chained in the Court of Justice; trumpet vines wind around an old tree, until at last the vines wither and the tree dies, each having failed the other.

Gu Ziqin of Jiangdong has an unyielding, immaculate bearing. Though his sickly body props up half the southeast, he willingly becomes a piece on the emperor's chessboard. He casts his pheasant-feathered cap to the ground, his plain robes stained with frost. As he bows in submission, his eyes reflect the flames that engulfed Pingyang City all those years ago, and the touch of warmth in the emperor's palm.

Lu Qingyan, the beautiful chancellor, shifts the world with every move of her pieces. Half a broken jade pendant lies hidden in her sleeve, and an unforgotten beloved is buried in her heart. She has seen the sun and moon trade places above the Golden Hall, but cannot see whether the realm hidden in her sleeve is a brocade dyed in blood or a wilderness buried in snow.

The young Mingyue Nu has a face like the emperor's and a smile like the spring sun. He makes a prison of the ground around him and writes "Gu Family Cottage" in blood. Yet on the snowy night of the palace coup, he uses a fading lamp to illuminate the emperor's lonely shadow, then shatters into light in the mirror.

But where does true release lie, among the mountains and rivers, or beneath the Yellow Springs?

Only the snow and wind are endless. The trumpet vines bloom again after fading, while the thousand-year-old palace walls stand silent, mistaking red for green.

Theme: In the pursuit of "the realm for the common good," a sage will ultimately become a tyrant, and true redemption may exist only in the destruction of the individual and the ashes of history.