Han Seoyeon's father has just been posted as Governor in the chief to the fortress of Ximo Judian, the furthermost outpost in the Borderlands. It’s a cushy job – there isn’t really any real administration to do there, let alone military operation – and it’s one of several jobs which are prestige on paper only: it’s a stepping stone into getting a senior position in the country’s ruling administration. Seoyeon’s father is determined to excel, though, which also means shaving down the running costs. The soldiers patrol the Borderlands, but there isn’t really that much to patrol. The Borderlands are uninhabited scrub and waste, occasional ghost fires burning from the war three generations ago, but the threat is long-since gone. Ximo doesn’t need a garrison of a hundred soldiers. It probably doesn’t even need ten.

Seoyeon has barely been there a day before she can’t wait to be shot of the place. She’s willing to tolerate it because her father will have a good job at the end, and that means she’ll be able to enter into high society in the capital, which she’s wanted all her life. But a year in Ximo genuinely seems like purgatory – especially when the soldiers there are hostile to her father’s benign wishes and when one of the young ones, promoted shortly before they arrived there, insists there’s Something Out There.

Really, Seoyeon wishes she could punch Captain Park Chanyeol in the face, but with his combat training it likely wouldn’t even hurt him and he’d just laugh at her. And one of the maids says she’s seen him cupping flames in his bare hands, so picking a fight is probably a bad idea. She doesn’t know if she wants to get to the bottom of his mysterious ways, because he definitely does some odd things, or if it’s going to be a better idea to try to sweet talk her father into kicking Park Chanyeol out. Captain Park would be the cheapest officer of reasonable rank to leave in Ximo with the Governor’s intended cuts, and for some godforsaken reason, her father actually likes him.

Convinced that the soldiers’ wild stories of the Borderlands are just that – stories (it’s not like anybody’s produced evidence to back them up) – Seoyeon frequently ventures out for some solitude away from the suffocating stone walls of Ximo… only to discover that Captain Park’s warnings aren’t hollow, and that she’s lost herself in a nightmare.