RULE AND RUIN

VIKTOR LANTSOV

TWENTY-FOUR ❈ HUMAN PRINCE OF RAVKA

The third-born son of one of the bloodiest kings Ravka had ever known arrived into the world in much the same way as his father had before him: with a snarl that would someday damn nations, a war cry hanging on his very first breath. Anything less would have been an embarrassment, a disgrace, for Lantsov men were not soft, nor were they gentle, nor were they quiet; they were hard, they were cruel, their voices alone stirred long-dead hearts into the fervor that prepares a man to die for his cause, and Viktor, strong even before he took his first steps, was no exception. He was a harsh boy, a terrible boy, a prince of the very worst sort: bred for war and taught to kill, with teeth dripping blood and a jaw like a blade—apt to cut, and cut deep—and though the throne would never be his, the people loved him and feared him for it all the same, for there can never be the former without the latter where matters of savagery are concerned, and he exemplified everything the Lantsov name stood for. Ivan was a king in the making, steel-spined and silver-tongued and cold, and Anton was a general-to-be, a man whom even the sun would follow to its death, yet Viktor possessed the best and worst parts of them both: the heir’s bloodthirst and ruthlessness, the spare’s arrogance and wit. Even as a boy, he seemed poised to bring the world to its knees, and on some ominous days, when he felled men twice his size and spoke of mercy like a myth, some feared he might.

Their fears could have built kingdoms, and he would’ve toppled them all. He took to the training rooms like a wolf to its prey, wild-eyed and vicious and hungry—wielded a sword like an extension of himself and struck with the grace of a dancer, and it was beautiful, the way he moved, the way he fought: like he’d been born for the sole purpose of swallowing the art of war whole. He was a war dog, a conqueror, a man before all things quivered—and rightfully so. He earned his seat in the war room at the green age of fourteen—younger, even, than his brothers—and won his first battle a mere two years later, a feat accomplished by few before him and apt to be repeated by even fewer after him. He became the kind of man men followed headfirst into a firefight if only to save themselves from his wrath, the kind of colonel that inspired surrender in even the most formidable enemies. If his brothers and sisters had been born to be revered, to be adored, he’d been born for the sole purpose of being feared, of being brutal, of reviving a love of country and the violence such love often demands, and he did so well. People would remember Ivan for his birthright, for the things he was able to do simply because fate had favored him first, but they would remember his youngest brother for accomplishments entirely his own: for the crunch of bone, the slaughter of foreign kings, the blare of golden trumpets and the gleam of medals abound.

Yet he would never be satisfied with the shadows, the scraps of greatness that fell from the table of his brothers; he was born greedy, as all purple-blooded men are, and no number of victories could sate his longing for true greatness, for a glory that would prevail as eternally as the sun, and perhaps even longer. His hunger led him into battle after battle, bloodbath after bloodbath, but at the end of it all, when the sun sank so low as to hide itself from view and he fell into bed for rest he’d earned but didn’t want, he coveted. He starved. He dreamed with eyes wide open of the day he—not his brother—was seated on that dais, and when Ravka’s future king fell to an enemy unseen, he let himself lust after it even more, ravenous now that it was closer to his grasp than it had ever been before. It wasn’t that he hadn’t a heart, that he hadn’t loved his elder brother in his own cold, cruel way; it was that he bled for Ravka in ways his siblings never would, and Viktor—the little prince, and before Anastasia, the baby—had spent the better half of his life getting everything his gunpowder heart could’ve possibly desired, and what he desired was this: a Ravka that did not break or bend, that took with reckless abandon and slaughtered those who dared to cry out. He dreamt of a kingdom as ruthless and savage as he, with a true Lantsov man on the throne, and what he wanted, he got.

He returned from war a stiff-limbed soldier, a proud-eyed colonel; he returned from war the Prince of Ravka, brother to its next King and his successor—should tragedy be cruel enough to strike again—and it was in that moment, when he laid eyes on his brother, half-bastard and half-king, wearing the crown meant for his own head, that his soul grew as black as the darkness that had claimed its last wearer, terrible and utterly beyond redemption. It might consume him; it might be the death of him, this jealousy, this envy, red-hot and blistering, but not before it’s the death of any who stand in his way first, not before he carves his name into the Ravkan countryside for the world to behold. Let it be known that when the victory bells toll, their sorry excuse for a king is not to blame; let it be known that in matters of war and sacrifice, the youngest Lantsov boy always has been. For if war is desolation, he is devastation, and the crown bears heavy on the weak and unworthy; only the strong prevail.

CONNECTIONS

ANTON & ANASTASIA LANTSOV: The same blood that burns through his veins pulses through their own, though he swears, at times, that in the case of his brother, there must’ve been some mistake. It’s the only logical conclusion he cares to draw, though certainly not the only one that’s presented itself, and he’ll defend it until the day he dies, provided he hasn’t been given his due prior: he has only one brother, and he lies six feet buried; the man before him is a thief, an impostor, and he’ll bleed for it, just like he did on the training room floor all those years ago. He may wear the crown, but he will never be his king. Anastasia, however, is one of the few things in his life that he loves—perhaps even more than his wars, than his bloodshed and his swords, though he’s never been sentimental enough to tell her. He’s closest to her, be it out of necessity or choice, and it’s for their mutual benefit that he keeps his watchful gaze discreet; love is weakness, and freedom is fleeting.

DMITRI ALEKSEEV: It’s a secret—theirs, though he’s loath to call it that, and if a soul should consider himself brave enough to ask, the prince would sharply deny it; saints know Viktor Lantsov wouldn’t be caught dead with a bloodletter in his bed. Yet he lets the other man come crawling if he pleases—when he pleases, with barbed tongue and rough hands at the ready. This is not soft, this is not romantic; this is blood sacrifice, the taking of another until there’s nothing left. This is an abomination, a disgrace. If he could feel shame, he might put a stop to it—might give the heartrender a black eye the next time he slips in uninvited, but he lost his shame years ago, amid rubble of his own creation. Perhaps it was inevitable.

VALERIYA VASNEV: He knows he should feel proud—smug, even, that he’s been offered the hand of one of the most eligible bachelorettes at court without the slightest bit of courting on his part, but he feels little in that regard, seeing her merely as another prize offered to him by his parents to be toyed with and tossed aside later. Though sharp in her own spoiled, cunning ways, she’s much too soft for him to love her like he does his battles, to see her as a warzone to be conquered. Yet she seems to feel differently, and has had no qualms about making sure he knows it, stealing touches and offering some of her own, when he’ll entertain her. Let her write her love letters and plan her perfect wedding; she’ll marry a fighter, but never a lover.

VASILY BARANOV

TWENTY-NINE ❈ HUMAN THE ROYAL COURT | DUKE

There are those who are born into tragedy -- and then there are those who are born a tragedy. Cursed, is the word that is often rolled over in his mind; rolled like water as it rises and tumbles over itself in the ocean. It is repeated with a soft sigh, not unlike the relentless lapping of waves as they crashed against the wooden sides of his ship. Echoing in his mind over and over again, to the point where he almost forgets what it is like to live without the knowledge that he is cursed, that he is condemned. It was quite contrary to the words that his mother had murmured -- with her hair matted against her brow in sweat, lips cracked and eyes glassy, partially in ardor and partially with the gentle agony that often precedes death. She caressed her zvyozdochka  tenderly, adoringly; so entranced was she with his glittering eyes, little pink lips, and melodic coos that she did not realize how each breath became more difficult and painful. Even in her abysmal suffering, she was able to whisper to her little star how much she loved him. With her last breath, she whispered how blessed she was, to hold her most beloved in her arms. It is a story his father often recounted to him in his drunken stupors, muttering -- just before the alcohol got the better of him -- how disgusted he was that he could have fallen in love with someone so damnably stupid and naive. For his father, from the first glance that he took of his heir, was able to say with utter certainty that his only son was a final condemnation on the failing Baranov name. 

Since he could barely tolerate looking at his only child as a young babe, one can only imagine what it was like to watch him grow into a personage that everyone deemed handsome. They called him gallant and noble, a knight in shining armor that even the worst of society had to pay their respect to. A bevvy of sins could be lavished upon him, yet he still was seen as the better man. With depravity dripping off of him like the petals of a flower that has drunk too much water, he still managed to come out looking as if he were holier than a saint. His father watched with a curl of his lip as his son rose as easily as a falcon in the sky, unfettered by all that he himself had been tethered by. Though his father had believed that his mother had been daft, the head of the Baranov household had to admit that she had more or less been right. Vasily was as lofty as the stars in the night sky -- he was as untouchable as them to. But stars, like anything else, may be shifted about. Their constellations may be shaped and changed if one has the heart to grab a hold of them and shape them for their own. His father did not have just the heart (or lack thereof), his father had the snarling determination to grab his son in the middle of the night and place him onto a ship that Vasily learned to call home. Under the pretense of trade, in the name of the Baranov household, he was sent from one strange country to another -- learning tongues and cultures as one might learn living and breathing, which is to say, all too easily. 

But the tragedy was not to be found in the lack of love in his household, nor the fact that such an opportunity was ripped away from him the moment he took his first breath. It was not to be found in the weaving of his story, the nonexistence of a place to call home. He was a tragedy because, throughout it all, he began to slowly realize why his mother had dubbed him her zvyozdochka . They say that in death, souls find their clarity. His mother was no exception, for in her death, he knew that she saw the emptiness that exists between the stars and how he was made of the same darkness that exists in the space between them. When the sun rose to greet him, he tried to greet it in kind by filling the void that ate at him like a mocking crow; picking away at him piece by piece, relentless in its pecking. The Unsea had more light than whatever brewed in his heart, if there was a heart to be found in whatever lay beneath the skill of the tragic Baranov boy. There were those who turned to the sea, so as to find fulfillment somewhere between the breaths of the waves, somewhere within the white sea foam. So he welcomed his banishment with open arms, which quickly grew cold once he realized that the nothingness in his heart was likely a reflection of the nothingness the world had to offer. One only had to look into his eyes to realize that he was not born into a tragedy, no. Vasily Baranov was an utter tragedy. 

Perhaps the most tragic thing about him was his hope that he could be something more. It was not something that he dared to whisper in the darkness of the night, nor in the blinding brilliance of the morning. For such a secret was never safe, no matter with whom or what or where a person shared it. Should he even think to say it out loud, he might realize how utterly pathetic he truly was, how deep his condemnation ran: thus the tragedy would end and the disparity would ensue. His hope was only encouraged by his return to Ravka, the wanton ways of the court a welcome change from the delicacy of and intricacies of war-induced trade. Though there be an opportunity, he also knew that it would be all too soon before he felt the chasm within him yawn once more, stretching as it swallowed yet another flame. The pattern would repeat itself once more as it has every day of his life. The emptiness as unfathomable as the Unsea would greet him like an old friend. He could wear the smile, play the games, and be the debonair knight in armor -- accented with a roguish smile -- that the country of Ravka wanted him to be. Yet that would never change him. He, the greatest tragedy of Ravka that there ever has been. That there ever will be. 

CONNECTIONS

DRUVIK JADEJA: He remembers the day he smuggled Druvik into Ravka, the drunken words that he had slurred out. They were ones that he had hoped would be carried away by the seawind, but Vasily had never been the lucky sort. But Druvik had offered to give him a change in fortune, using his blessed gifts to concoct something pivotal. Something that future historians would later dictate as one of those creations that likely should have never been made in the first place. It was inspired by the emptiness that Vasily had whispered about, a drug that was made for the sole purpose of wiping it all away. Only for a few hours, hours that would likely put into perspective how fleeting time could be. Before Druvik had stepped off the ship, he had left it in the tragic boy’s hands, with nothing more than a smile as warm as his brown eyes seemed. It still remained unopened, in the mess of Vasily’s drawer, the thing that could change what Vasily was. What he perceived himself to be. 

STASYA BELOV: They were a wonder to him, a novelty that he was keen to explore. The Squaller seemed to be the only thing that was capable of holding his attention, with their almost ethereal ways. He remembered the songs his crew would sing as the mist hung low and thick in the morning -- so thick that the sun had to fight its way through. They seemed to be the song personified, the mere sound of their voice bringing to mind the haunting melody. Perhaps it was the way in which their eyes seemed to hold his gaze whenever he drew close enough to look into them. Perhaps it was his fascination with their Grisha and their abnormal ways. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps. For whatever reason he drew close, he could not seem to draw himself away. 

RHEA TERESHKIN: Should he ever have motivation enough to list out a series of his greatest regrets, Rhea Tereshkin’s name is among the higher part of the list. For, when he bother to think of her, he cannot help but be barraged by images of heated touches, wanton moans, and much more lewd images. How she became a respected lady of the court, he is not entirely sure. Although, with his ability to relay emotion as a common person might he should not be so surprised that others are as capable at playing this game as he. In the few moments where she has made less of a show of baring her teeth at him and dragged him to a quiet corner of the room, the proposals she has made have been amusing, to say the least. But who knows? Perhaps the lackadaisical ways of the court have finally bored him enough where he just might consider causing a ruckus and wreaking some havoc. One’s own emptiness can only entertain a person for so long.

VALERIYA VASNEV

TWENTY-ONE ❈ HUMAN THE ROYAL COURT | DUCHESS

She was born with the world at her feet and the stars in her hair—a pretty, pampered girl given dominion over all beautiful things able to be owned, and the sin all children are unfailingly born with missed her so that another might prosper: the rare crime of having too much. She wanted for nothing—not for the finest food, for the most beautiful dresses, and certainly not for the outpouring of love and attention from her doting parents—yet she desired everything, hungry even as she ate her fill, greedy even as she had enough, and perhaps that was her downfall, her damnation. Where others chose to repent, to fall on bent knee and beg for mercy, she embraced the very thing that robbed her of grace and had the nerve to ask for more still—if there was something to be had, be it fun, sweets, or trouble, one could know with absolute certainty that the Vasnev girl would be elbow-deep in it. It was endearing, seeing a young girl so unapologetic in her desires, courageous enough to dare to take the world for all it had, but it was a trait better reserved for the young, for the children not quite old enough to know better. She was a doll in her satin dresses, with her pearls and her rubies and her pink rose petals scattered about her dressing table—the ideal little duchess if there ever was one, but the sun sets even on the wealthy, and though it was a spectacle, as all things concerning her were, it left in its wake a darkness many possessed and few were brave enough to acknowledge.

She grew into something equally beautiful and terrifying, graceful, delicate, and cold—a Ravkan rose blooming in the dead of winter, and her sins only seemed to suit her more as she aged, clinging to her ink-black heart like the sleek fabric of a ballgown to the curves of her waist. She was cruel in the way of a girl who had never learned how to be anything else, and just as they had when she was but a little thing, they indulged her every whim, fawned over her like she was the nobility’s very own sankta. To be aloof was to leave more to the imagination; to turn her nose up at those who hadn’t had the good sense to be born into wealth was to give her lessers a better look at her elegant profile. She was a monster, this girl of silk and lace, and deep down, perhaps her admirers knew it, but it’s in the nature of men to worship that which may kill them, and Valeriya, precious Valeriya, was deadly in ways as familiar as they were strange. She tempted fate with every giggle and sneer, all but begged it to make an example of her—or, at the very least, to try. Girls like her were invincible, untouchable, gold-filled and divinity-kissed; girls like her knew everything, for their books had taught them so, yet knew absolutely nothing just the same. Funny, how a girl so full of life and fine wine could be so hollow; tragic, how she pitied the very souls who might’ve pitied her, had they had the luxury. She looked in the mirror and saw staring back at her a girl worthy of the worship of the world, and the world seemed to spin on in agreement.

And spin it did; as she aged, it became as clear as the crystal glasses she sipped from that Valeriya Vasnev was not merely a fleeting darling, a woman to be loved for a season and forgotten the next, but something enduring, the sort of woman immortalized in sonnets and beautifully paved streets. She was as stunning as she was despicable, as rich in naivete as she was in conceit, and they loved her for it, as they loved all terrible things—in earnest, yet with a passion so dreadfully shallow. She was everything they aspired to be and everything they hoped to never become all at once—a martyr drowning in luxury and crushed beneath the burden of setting an example for the lower classes, the patron sankta of gentility and beauty, a spoiled rotten girl who knew not what it was to live a life not drenched in sweet perfume and draped in silk smooth enough to rival the sea. “Let them drink kvas,” she’d laughed once, watching from her pedestal as the commoners starved outside the city gates, aloof in the way only a woman who’s never known true hunger can be. She was a fearsome thing to behold—this pampered, purring duchess, this sharp, cruel beauty, and she belonged to each of them in some way, and them to her. Wickedness loves company, and opulence seeks to be adored; there could be nothing less than a beautiful, unending glory for the Vasnev woman, and in keeping with her indulgent upbringing, there never was.

And now, it seems, there never will be. Betrothed to a Lantsov prince and poised to become a princess, she stands to see her name written in the history books, scrawled alongside that of kings and queens, of conquerors and kingdom-makers; she stands to be remembered, to be revered even more than she already is, and it’s beautiful, even as her people starve, and it’s beautiful, even as they sacrifice their sons and daughters for wars that will certainly outlive them all. She dances as the world burns, a harrowing, haunting sort of tragic, and they worship her still, hollow disciples falling at the feet of a sankta who knew suffering as intimately as she knew the stars—not at all. The truth has never been pretty, and beauty, though hardly ever true, is hardly fleeting. Let her wear her foxfur hats and white leather gloves; let her ride in velvet lined carriages while Ravka is forced to its knees. She was raised to be perfect, not sincere.

CONNECTIONS

VIKTOR LANTSOV: She’d like nothing more than to have him adore her half as much as the others at court do, and it’s a smite to her pride, no less, that her fiancé seems infinitely more interested in the art of war than courtship, more inclined to carry muskets than roses. She’s convinced herself that it’ll pass, that one day, when the war is won and he’s heralded as nothing short of a hero, he will love her more deeply than he’s ever loved his bloody, violent battles; she’ll make it so. Until that day comes, though, she’ll keep stealing glances across the room and touches when he’ll let her, writing his name behind hers in her prettiest calligraphy at dawn. He’s a challenge half-won; she has his hand, and one day, she’ll have his heart. She always gets what she wants; how could this time be any different?

ARISHA KOVROV: It could be said, with no small amount of reason, that she hasn’t a right to be angry, for the position and the responsibilities that inevitably accompany it wouldn’t suit her fickle fancies, and to say so would be correct, but the duchess has never been the sort to bear wrongs patiently, nor has she ever had the grace to share. She’d wanted the apprenticeship perhaps more than she’d wanted to breathe, an inclination owing to Lady Kovrov’s own desire of it, and being so cruelly robbed of it was a blow almost too harsh to bear. But Arisha isn’t the only pretty woman at court with intellect and ambition to rival the stars, and she’ll see to it that the score is not only evened, but tilted in her favor once more. A glance at the ring on her finger tells her that, perhaps, it already has.

VASILY BARANOV: She pities him, and it would be a sorry, condescending thing, had she not first seen him as something of an equal. He found himself at court as a victim of loss, an orphan, a man robbed of his father and a son forced to pick up the pieces, and her heart—her shallow, detached heart—bled for him a little, convinced, somehow, that his might bleed for her in return; it didn’t, nor did he worship her as she might’ve hoped, and she feels bad for him still, for his ghastly lack of poise and strikingly poor taste in companions. A man ought to learn how to conduct himself in a place like this, as wondrous as it is cruel—she would know.

VALERIAN PETROV

TWENTY-SIX ❈ INFERNI THE ORDER OF SUMMONERS (ETHEREALKI)

There once was a boy claimed by none and beloved by all, a matchstick child who burned with enough ferocity to keep the monsters of the night at bay. They could never be sure where he came from—who had left him and why—but they had their theories to keep them warm when the chill of another living tragedy set into their bones, and that was, perhaps, the best thing about him, for a time: he was at once everything they imagined him to be and nothing like they’d expected him to be, and there was comfort in that, in him. He arrived at the orphanage like an afterthought, like a candle left to burn down to nothing, and he’d leave like a page torn out of one of their storybooks—a hero built from dust and dreams, from the ashes of what they all could’ve been, given the chance—but the rendition of him they’d remember most was the boy who’d lived and loved in between. They called him Val—short for Valerian, for valiant, for a knight in hand-me-down armor—and he did everything in his power to earn the name, making cowards out of almost-bullies and lending a toothy grin to anyone in dire need. In the short year he spent in the Duke’s household, he became the closest thing to a beacon of light the Keramzin orphans had ever known; he was happy, and he was alive in ways they’d never seen in the confines of such a place, and one day, when he left it—and he would, because children like him always did—he would have more than a mere semblance of a life waiting for him. He would be the exception. And he was; in true Val fashion, he was more.

They came with the changing of the seasons, as they always did, with dust clinging to their keftas and the sort of detached arrogance about them reserved for those who had never been so unfortunate as to live in a place like this. The Grisha examiners and what they did with those they deemed worthy were privy to the whims of those who told more stories than truth, but he’d been bold enough to defy all of their childish warnings, reckless enough to look them in the eye and smile—not in the way of a cowering orphan hoping for reassurance, but in the way of an equal seeking understanding. The woman in blue’s fingers had only just brushed the smooth skin of his wrist when he felt it: the warmth of a fire long-burning coursing through his veins as surely as his own blood, the pull of something as insistent and natural as the need to breathe—like called to like, and the crackling of the hearth became a siren’s call where it had once been a lullaby. The fire called him by name: not Val, but Valerian—not a boy, but a blaze, and he answered in kind, an orphan turned ember turned inferno. He took to his new life like a moth to a flame and never looked back, not because he hadn’t loved the brothers and sisters he left behind, but because he loved the world enough to let it do with him what it pleased. He had the sort of faith only orphans could live by—a blind trust in fate, in the tendency of things to fall apart in all the right ways—and it should’ve killed him, should’ve ripped him to shreds like it did all other golden boys destined for the fall.

But he was no Icarus, and this was not a tragedy—not yet; it couldn’t be, not before he’d built something worth devastating. And build he did; he became one of the greatest Inferni the Little Palace had seen in years, burning his name into their memories and searing his way into their hearts with every slightly-crooked grin and nearly-cocky quip. He became one of the Darkling’s most honored Grisha, a man worthy of praise and the gift of power that frightened even him, but the reward he treasured most was never the way people looked at him—the way he was able to walk into a room of people and command their attention as surely as any flame, or even the pride that came with knowing he’d made more of a life for himself than the mistress at Keramzin could’ve ever prayed for; it was her. She came into his life suddenly, surely, as a tidal wave rolls into the coast, and like any force of nature, she left irreparable damage in her wake, scars no healer and no eternity could wipe away—to his pride, to his confidence, to his heart. She kept him grounded, this riptide girl, this ruination with eyes as blue as the sea she ruled and a heart twice as wild—but she terrified him, too. And perhaps that was the best part about it, and about her: the sense that he could love something as much as he feared it, could want to save something and be prepared to make a martyr of it in the same breath—his kingdom, his power, himself. She taught him to be fearless, but humble—to face perilous waters as if he’d never known what it felt like to drown, but know, deep down, that he might soon learn. They were inseparable, the wave and the wildfire, despite all the laws of nature that dictated otherwise; theirs was a bond that defied all reason.

But it wasn’t fireproof, not like the steel they fashioned their knives from, and when it was all said and done—when he’d watched the girl he loved die at the bloodied hands of the enemy and the blind cruelty of his own element, neither was he. He stole their fire and burned their village to the ground with it—ravaged their sinners and tore their gods down from their pedestals. He became his own god then, seething and vengeful and possessed by the sort of ruthlessness that inevitably fills the void of all-consuming grief, and when he returned home at last, he left behind him no survivors, no ruins from which to rebuild—only ash, scattered on the wind so as to prevent any sort of rising. They welcomed him home with open arms—lifted him upon their shoulders and called him a hero, but the man they’d known had died in the north, burned at the stake beside the closest thing to eternity he’d ever had, and the man who had come back to the palace in his stead had little regard for anything that didn’t burn. He played the part well for a time—let them make him their wolf-slayer, their kingdom-crasher, their golden boy with teeth—but a fire can only burn so long without stoking, and he won’t let anyone close enough to try. Such is the way of the wounded, always buying time to lick their wounds; such is the way of those left to mourn for things that weren’t theirs, but could’ve been. Grief is an ocean; he’s forgotten how to swim.

CONNECTIONS

ARSEN TARASOV: He’d never known what it felt like to have a brother until he met him, and the world was forever changed once he had. Born of different circumstances though they might’ve been, they were forged from the same fire—were warmed by the same volatile spark, and as such, they were rarely seen apart as children, something that hardly changed as they aged. The hearth fire and the wildfire, the flicker and the blaze—so alike and yet so different, a bond as peculiar as it was inevitable. He and the rest of the world are convinced one couldn’t exist without the other, and perhaps they’re right. The day he loses the Tarasov man is the day he loses his mind.

NEYSA RAI: It wasn’t because she was weak—kind where she should’ve been cruel, soft-spoken when she should’ve roared, nor was it due to any sort of grudge or prejudice on his part or hers, and perhaps that’s the worst of it: there had never been a reason for what he did to her, and what he still does, and he’s never made much of an effort to give her one. Juliya would have his head if she knew how harshly he was treating a girl she would’ve welcomed with open arms, and one day, she still might. But the truth, whether he’d like to admit it or not, is this: he wants to feel something—anything more than the nothingness left in her wake—and if he pushes her hard enough, Neysa Rai just might give him his due.

SHONA YUL-JUN & LUKA MRAVINSKY: They were the rowdy ones, the four of them—the whirlwind boys of a war-torn era, and everyone knew their names. Insufferable together and barely tolerable apart, they were both loved and hated—for what they did, for what they didn’t do, for what they were. Luka has always been the quietest of their ragtag group, but the Petrov man likes him all the more for it—finds him refreshing, even, after long hours of Arsen’s drawl and Shona’s barbed remarks. He and Yul-Jun have never seen eye to eye, even for the few short months they were the same height as children, but his is the sort of criticism a man like him needs—half-humbling, half-accepting. They’ve seen the change in him since her capture—were the first to see the monster he’d soon become, and though they haven’t yet, he supposes it’s only a matter of time before they leave him to the chaos he’s created. He’s learned to never count on forever.

VERA NIKOLAEV

TWENTY-ONE ❈ HEALER THE ORDER OF THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

* This character is trans and uses she/her and they/them pronouns.

She was meant to be the glue that would hold her half-broken family together, the miracle child that would reignite a flame that had long gone cold. Born to affluent parents who were held in the highest esteem by everyone at court but each other, she was bred to be an example—of propriety, of gentility, of anything but the ugly truth that thrived beneath the extravagance of Ravkan court, and in another life, perhaps she might’ve been. In another life, she might’ve become everything her parents wanted and a mere fraction of what she had the potential to be—a respectable, but distant family friend of the Lantsovs, a benevolent, if not a bit odd, distraction from the cracks her father’s infidelity had left in the family name, and little more. She might’ve been their Atlas, their savior, their own little saint—brought into the world for the sole purpose of bearing it on her too-narrow shoulders, but the world, it seemed, had other plans. In the making of Vera Nikolaev, it had sought to create not a hero, a martyr to bloody and press into the pages of its history books, but a confidante, a soul to burden with the secrets it couldn’t bear to keep for itself, and she played the part well, much to her parents’ dismay. They’d wanted a savior of the shallowest sort, a child that donned the silk and gossamer of court and spoke only of empty pleasantries, and what they’d gotten was a child who wrapped herself in cotton and wool and spoke of truths that ran far too deep for even the court scholars to understand. She was a child prophet, the world’s humble deliverer from itself, but above all, she was a disgrace.

It began with a bird—wings broken, heart fluttering, nearly forgotten and half-trampled in the languid frenzy of young nobility exploring the palace gardens. She’d been trailing behind, as she often did, dark eyes wide with wonder at things she’d seen dozens of times before, when she’d disappeared, seemingly waltzed away by the summer breeze or swallowed whole by the rose bushes, and though it certainly hadn’t been the first time, she frightened her parents nearly beyond their wits—sent the palace into a sort of fever not by her actions, as the other children often did, but by her absence. She was striking in that way—in her ability to make her silence louder than her words, but she grew only more peculiar once they found her there in the most obscure corner of the grove, knobby knees dirtied, brows furrowed, and small hands cupped around the shivering body of a creature better left for dead. For a long, quiet moment, she’d been almost normal, a child meeting death’s cold gaze for the first time; for a moment, their pity had outweighed their fear. But Vera Nikolaev was lost to them forever when death blinked first, when the bird she’d been holding sprung from her palms as if it had only been resting, whole and free and alive. They disowned her—called her a witch, a curse, an abomination, but none could deny what she truly was, what they’d mistaken for sheer oddity all along: a healer, half-blessed and half-cursed, half-poison and half-cure.

Whisked away to the Little Palace and draped in corporalki red, she became a noble of a different kind, a child who belonged more to the earth than she ever had her mother and father. It was liberating, being understood, and she thrived there, in the anatomy rooms and the schoolyard alike; she grew into the sort of Grisha who would live on long after she’d been buried—in books, in dreams, in the aspirations of the young and learning, but she would always be as she had been her whole life: peculiar, the sort of thing you hold at arms-length. She was still the strange enigma she’d always been, regarded curiously even by those who donned the same colors, whispered about behind cupped palms pulsing with power. She had not ceased to be a puzzle to those around her, her pieces scattered and oddly-shaped, and perhaps she never would be, for the way of the world is sacrifice, and the price to pay for the gift she’d been given was this: even those who were the stuff of myths, of creation stories, of divinity, would never fully grasp the knowledge she had—would never see what she saw when she peered outside her window, down at her palms, into their eyes: pain, longing, loss, hope. She saw the world and its people for the flawed things they were, and though they loved her for it, they feared her for it, too.

But make no mistake: the world has never been gentle with its affections, and in kind, neither is she. An upright healer who will just as readily toe the line of her breaking point to save you and reattach your finger at the wrong end for ingratitude, she’s as bitter as she is sweet, as foolish as she is wise. Perhaps it’s made her cynical, knowing just how cruel fate can be; perhaps it’s made her arrogant, being hand-picked as one of fate’s own favorites. Perhaps she’d have been better off ordinary, forgettable, a child raised on pretty lies and blissful ignorance. But for all her doubts, for all the questions she’s not certain she’ll ever be granted answers to, she’s never longed for the soft cloak of mediocrity, of being so easily understood and loved. Let it sting, she thinks; let the knife of knowing cut so deep that no earthly healer will ever be able to mend the damage. She has known divinity—has heard its breathless whispers in the dark, and she knows no truth greater than this: to love is to understand, and to understand is to hurt. This is her martyrdom, her terror-filled song.

CONNECTIONS

ANASTASIA LANTSOV: They were friends, once, before prejudice tore them from the warmth each other’s arms and tried to teach them what it was to hate. Sometimes, when they catch glimpses of the princess while in the Grand Palace to heal, Vera remembers those days fondly, thinks of Anastasia’s freckled nose crinkling and her soft brown curls wrapped around their fingers, and they smile, at what once was—at what could’ve been. They know better than to dwell in the past, as the future makes a jealous lover, but they can’t help but wonder if she remembers, if she knows—if, by some stroke of fate, she misses them, too.

OYUN KIR-NARAN: Though it’s never been particularly difficult to invoke their momentary wrath, it’s rare that their ire festers into something more. The irony of the Shu Han diplomat being one of a select few to earn such a place of dishonor at their table certainly isn’t lost on them, but their own nobility, though given up in exchange for a share in something greater, is lost on her. Lady Kir-Naran would do well to learn that prejudice hardly sits well with diplomacy; if she can’t do so on her own, the healer might be inclined to educate her themselves.

LEI YUL-KEUNG: They saw through his smile like light streaming through polished glass, heard the sadness in his laugh as though he’d stopped time to tell them his sorrows himself. He was an open book to Vera, they who had never tried to hide the secrets they knew, and they told him so, equal parts crass and empathetic. “You’re not really happy, are you?” And so began a tumultuous sort of discovery, an understanding not unlike the tides—ever pushing and pulling, consistent in the way it gives. They won’t call it love; they’re not quite sure they know what the word means, but it’s something, and for now, that’s enough. 

SVETLANA GAVRIKOVA

TWENTY-SIX ❈ HUMAN OPRICHNIK

She was ordinary once, a girl tinged by that soft shade of contentedness that lulls nearly everyone it touches into mediocrity like sirens call sailors to their deaths. She dreamed as all children did, of castles and princes and horses black as night, and like all children, she eventually outgrew her wilder fantasies in favor of tamer, more attainable ones—of stability, of a full stomach, of a life not spent in anticipation of the next loss. Svetlana Gavrikova was the sort of daughter mothers and fathers prayed for—as intelligent as she was beautiful, as strong as she was gentle, and though she was never soft in the way of petals and other things that wilt at the slightest touch, she might’ve been. Given the chance, she might have gone on to live some semblance of the life she’d always dreamed of, one step behind bliss and one step ahead of misery, but something within her wouldn’t rest; her heart beat far too strongly and erratically to ever be satisfied with normalcy, and the reality of it struck her between the eyes one fateful day and knocked something loose within the Gavrikova girl—something cold. Later, they’d say the war had gotten to her, as it tended to do—that it had rendered her as jaded as it had its veterans and its widows, as broken as its grieving and orphaned, and perhaps the world would have been better off if it had. But the war brought out something in Svetlana long-buried, disguised in lace and chiffon and masked as pretty, petty desires: a hunger—for greatness, for power, for infamy, and most of all, for the blood that inevitably preceded it.

She became a soldier at sixteen, torn from her already mourning parents’ grasp with all the carelessness of men who wept not for the deaths of their soldiers, but the wounding of their pride, and her family grieved for her, believing they would never see their beloved daughter again. They were right, as she’d recall some years later, but not in the way they’d imagined; the child they’d raised would be forever lost to them, stolen away not by the cold clutches of death, but the tantalizing embrace of the dark, of the fatal kiss of ambition. She was a walking contradiction even before her comrades took notice, a daydream of a girl with startling blue eyes and fiery red hair who fought like every man’s worst nightmare. They’d seen her as a liability, a lamb of a girl to throw to the wolves and forget, but she wasn’t the soft, weak thing they’d imagined at all. She was ruthless, antagonistic, a sword in her enemy’s side; she was brutal, perhaps the most brutal of them all, and she wouldn’t rest until they knew her, feared her, heard death’s call in the sound of her name—and, some thought, not even then. She shocked her fellow soldiers nearly into a frenzy when she became one of the chosen few, hand-picked by one of the Darkling’s best men to join their ranks, but those who knew her best had the foresight to recognize that she more than belonged among the most dangerous soldiers the First Army had ever seen—that one day, she might best them all, too.

Thus, she traded her ragged First Army garb for oprichnik charcoal and her place in the barracks for quarters in a secluded wing of the Little Palace, where she fought a new fight, one entirely different from the war her family had lost her to, but one worth fighting just the same, and just like the last, it too changed her—led her to become the sort of soldier both otkazat’sya and Grisha feared. She evolved in the worst of ways—learned to draw blood as thoughtlessly as she breathed and came to see the abilities of those she was surrounded by as weakness, rather than strength; she left what was left of her fickle, empty heart at the gates and brought with her only what she couldn’t live without—her blades, her gun, her terrible and reckless savagery. There was no place at the Darkling’s side for the weak, for those more inclined to have mercy than to take action; a man like that left no room for anything short of the cruelty that both builds empires and crumbles them, that renders those who serve it immortal long after their horrible deeds have been done and their ashes scattered on the wind. She wanted more than infamy, more than the satisfaction of entering a room and watching the meeker sort scatter before her eyes; she wanted more than the pride that came with knowing she’d served her country well. There was a war brewing in her sovereign’s eyes and within the walls of the Little Palace, and she wanted nothing more than to go down in history as one of its heroes, or if it so fancied it, its villains—the world could have its pick.

She’s dangerous, this girl of blood and savagery, this red bird in a blizzard—begging to be noticed, demanding to be remembered. She’s dangerous, and it’s taken entirely too long for those around her to see it, but now that they have, it’s a spectacle of sorts, watching a woman that might’ve been an angel descend deeper into hell than even the devil himself would dare. She has evolved into a young woman unrecognizable even to those who raised her, a dreamer turned survivor turned killer. Ravka should rue the day she was plucked from its ranks and given some semblance of power, for ambition never tires, and she’ll see to it that it increases tenfold. She is a rose with thorns abound, a knife between your shoulder blades, the nightmare that wakes you up screaming in your bed. She is chaos incarnate, a beautiful thing with sharp teeth, fearsome and longing, and when darkness reigns at last, she’ll be sitting at its right hand, ready to eat the world raw.

CONNECTIONS

THE DARKLING:  A foolish girl though she might’ve once been, she’s under no illusions now where her sovereign is concerned, not convinced—as so many seem to be—that making a show of one’s power or, for the braver sorts, trying to find one’s way into his bed, will earn a hopeful follower any sort of praise or favor with the second-most powerful man in Ravka. The Darkling notices whoever he pleases and disregards the futile efforts of those he doesn’t, and she’s learned, after several months of serving him, that he’s utterly unimpressed with ordinary acts of savagery, of brutality any mere man is fully capable of. Thus, she’s decided to aim higher—to become, blow by furious blow, a soldier he can neither ignore nor deny. If that makes her a fanatic, so be it. 

GEMMA PAVLOVA: She’d dragged the younger woman back to the Little Palace with every intention of presenting her to her sovereign as a prize of sorts, a trophy to be admired and discarded; though she succeeded in doing so, the interest he’s taken in the girl is utterly wasted on her, and the energy the oprichnik exerted to deliver her to his hand, it seems, was wasted as well, for she’s yet to see an inkling of recognition or praise from him in response. Svetlana is a good soldier, well-capable of following orders and working in the shadows, but she’s loath to let anyone—least of all a newcomer—come between her and the one thing she wants most: power. The sun still rose and set before her, and it’ll do so after her; she’s dispensable, and the guard won’t let her forget it.

FYODOR DRUGOV & ADRIK VAHKROV: They are the children of the dark—chosen by it, not born of it, and it’s made all the difference. They’re every bit as brutal as she, and together, the three of them make a fearsome trio in the eyes of mere mortals and godlings alike. But for all her loyalty, for all her pride in who they are—in what they make up, her ambition is and always will be greater. She would protect them with her life—would fight with them to the death, but she would sacrifice even them for a taste of divinity, a share of the immortality that comes with heralding a new age. Perhaps it will come easily, as infamy never does; perhaps they can all call themselves the kings and queens of the new world order, the empire built on shadows. But she’s never been keen on sharing, and that, she knows, will never change. 

TATIANA LANTSOV

TWENTY ❈ HUMAN THE ROYAL COURT | LADY-IN-WAITING/PRINCESS’ CONFIDANTE

She was a beautiful baby -- not in the way that is generally believed to be beautiful, the kind of beauty that is lied about only because people feel it necessary to say that the miracle of life is something wondrous to behold. No, she was a truly beautiful baby, despite the ugly tune that she wailed so cantankerously. Her eyes shown bright and engaging, demanding that each person in the room hold her gaze. Her nose slightly peaked so as to hint at some royally descended heritage. Even the queen herself had to remark that she looked more like a princess than her own children did -- it was nothing more than a joke, a remark meant to coo and preen the feathers of her sister and the newborn child. But it stuck, as surely as disease rooted itself in a bushel of roses. A princess she was told she was, and a princess is what she believed herself to be. The entitlement was there in every demand she made as she grew up ( I want another pony, father, not just a fat, old one ) and as she grew older ( I will have who I see fit and the only one I want is him! ). The brown eyes that were once thought to be warm and engaging had a way of making even the sun itself seem like something cold and distant.

Not many understood how it happened, the coldness in her eyes that seemed to be rival the tundra of Fjerda itself. But, there were some servants who whispered that they could see it growing, like dark, green ivy upon a wall. It grew slowly, assuredly -- no one able to see it, not even the monster who it afflicted. It began when she was five, chasing after her cousins in the corridors of the court. Occasionally, they would run into this ambassador or that general. Oh, how they would sing the praises of the Lanstov children, the revered name a sweet tune on their tongue. But she? Their eyes would pass over her like a painting people had seen one too many times. The emotion of the painting generic. The beauty of it? Even more so. Her name was not a prize held on the tips of their tongues, but a thing as common as salt, as unwanted as bile. That was where it began, but that is not where it ended. This instances were as numerous as the stars, as hated as them too. How they mocked her, watching her in her embarrassing demise -- the poor, tragic princess who could never be. 

But she learned that there were ways to defy what the path that the stars had set out for her. There was a way to grab them by their fading light and force them to succumb to the weight of her fingertips, the pressure of her thumb. It began with her voice -- it demanded, beguiled, and terrified. Whether she had it shrieking to the high heavens at a Grisha servant who had grown too careless or it hissed in a low, crooning tune -- mocking yet another potential suitor for her cousins. Then there was the way in which she carried herself; the fine cloth that caressed the soft curves of her skin, the jewels that graced her porcelain neck, kissing her skin as if it was not worthy. And it wasn’t. No one was. Not the Lantsov cousins with whom she once associated with as if they were closer than siblings, not the king nor the queen that had once sat upon the throne. She defied them in word, thought, and deed should she only dare to scream loud enough to demand it. That, the servants said, is when the dark, green ivy covered the wall and the windows that might have allowed some semblance of light. That, the servants said, is when the monster became shrouded in darkness. The darkness of ignorance, the darkness of envy. 

They wonder how her throat does not ache for shrieking at the servants so often and so long. Those who interact with her daily now know that it is better to muffle the harpy-like squawks by covering their ears rather than subjecting themselves to her brand of torture. When her rose-red lips open, many have learned that one of two things are likely to spill from them: either a harsh cacophony of demands or a symphony of reprimands. Either the way, the song that she sings has never once been a lamentation of the lives lost or the souls forgotten in the war and rampage that Ravka has suffered. She cares not for the people that languish in their woes and tribulations outside of the walls of Os Alta, no. What use is that to a woman whose heart is beset on the frivolous duties of a princess? War has not yet touched the chasms of her heart, nor has suffering. The only suffering she has ever known is that of being overlooked and ignored. But woe to anyone who now dares to do either. 

CONNECTIONS

ANASTASIA LANTSOV: They do not know how to be a proper princess. Tatiana watches them with a look of revulsion that is often carefully masked by a torrent of sycophant comments. But it is rather hard to mask the revulsion once Anastasia dons the crown, the sparkling, glittering thing that Tatiana cannot help but look at so enviously. However, all she wants is to be ever-closer to the crown and the undeserving head that wears it. Sometimes, when Anastasia is out of the room, Tatiana places it upon her luscious, dark hair and twirls about. Basking in what could have been. What should be. Anastasia is the closest thing she has to a sibling. She’d sooner trade their life if it meant to wear that crown and sit upon the throne while people bowed in adoration. But, again, they are the closest thing she has to a sibling. 

OYUN KIR-NARAN & RITA JAKOV: She considers them both to be her tea-time companions. Rita, less of a companion and more of a servant -- for who could ever think that she would dare consider a Grisha a friend? No, Oyun was more deserving of that title than Rita. Although she might remind Rita that it was necessary for her to strive for it -- the poor idiot often-times needed reminding. She was a bit slow that way, but, as her superior, it was Tatiana’s duty to make sure that she strove to better hself and her efforts since she was one of the only other Grisha who was allowed to reside with the humans. As for Oyun? Well, wasn’t it absolutely benevolent of Tatiana to take the foreigner under her wing? To speak with her and teach her the ways of the Ravkan court? Tatiana often wonders why they don’t dub her a saint here and now. 

ILYA TSAROV: He’s her fiancé. He does not know it, nor has it been declared “official” but he is her fiancé. She knew it from the day they had met, when they were but children frolicking around Os Alta. He had been loathe to admit it -- and is still reluctant to do so -- but she knows that he is going to acquiesce to the arrangement of the marriage anyway. Sometimes she sees him trying to make her jealous, flirting with this half-wit tramp or that disgusting trollop, but she knows it is his version of foreplay. Trying to make her chase him when she need not to. But her patience is growing rather thin -- his time remaining single is wearing away as well. 

STASYA BELOV 

TWENTY-ONE ❈ SQUALLER THE ORDER OF SUMMONERS (ETHEREALKI)

* this character is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.

Their name was Stasya. It was the name they were given at the orphanage and it has been the one that shaped them. Stasya. The mere sound of it was soft and weightless upon the lips, gentle in the way it rolled off of the tongue. When it was used in admonishment by the teachers of the orphanage, there was always that gentle caress of love that seemed to make even the most severe scoldings more bearable. As it was hollered through the halls of the old building, the volume was diminished – slightly, slightly – by the dependency in the young voices that called out their name. Yet, despite the lacquer of life that surrounded them, what with the doting and devotion that shadowed their steps like the most loyal of familiars. The animals that mirrored the souls of witches of old. But they were no witch, were they? The looks of the other children told them otherwise, the way that those who they had only known of as family looked at them as if they were something ill-begotten. Something wrong, something feared, something meant to incite terror rather than the ardor that they had once known. Oh, how wretched they felt as cold, nimble fingers clasped around their wrist, drowning them in the gale of their own power. Oh, how they loathed the feel of the fine cloth as it was draped around their skinny shoulders – marking them as something other. As something to be crucified and burned and martyred with words and looks and prejudices. What a terrible thing it is, to be a martyr at such a young age for a cause you do not believe in.

But they did learn to believe, were taught the wonders of their blood, their bones, their blessing that they called a gift. Hate was invited to fester in their heart, to make its blackened fingers close around the fluttering, forgetful thing. In Stasya’s heart, however, there was no room for such a decrepit creature to call it hearth and home. Instead, light flourished there in the face of slander and damnation that they received at the hands of those who thought themselves above the light of Keramzin and their kind. Darkness and despair tried to grasp at them, but they managed to evade it like a sparrow from the claws of an eagle, a hawk, a bird of prey. It was for their light and levity that they were often noticed, but even more so by the power that played at the tips of their fingers. All they had to do was beckon a gale with their finger and it would howl a mighty tune, bringing with it a wrath and destruction that was not befitting of a creature that seemed so gentle. Sometimes even they forget the power that was woven into their bones and how it harkened to their call like a volcra to the smell of blood. What they remembered, however, was the blood that they left in their wake when all the other soldiers had either fallen or fallen to their knees to bask in the aftermath of the bloodshed.  But then on a breeze they heard a sound that caused their heart to ache with such sorrow that they fell to their knees, to hold upon their scarlet stained lap a face that begged for a certain capacity of a gentleness, of a love, that they had not been aware they were capable of.

Impossibilities, however, were second nature to them – as was an innate need for the makings of martyrdom. It had been harmless, until it wasn’t. Love affairs of their world weren’t like the stories; when words trailed into oblivion and fate smiled kindly. Love affairs of their world were blood-red and torn at the edges like a telltale heart spilling cruor onto the battlefield, like the serrated edge of a knife. They were never vicious and thirsty like the others, but still they marched to war with their hair tied in ribbons of blue, still they quivered and summoned and felt the power blast through their bones and bring monstrous contraptions to the ground, wind and cold and a breeze so chilling that it could cut. They followed orders and quietly absorbed horror. And love was not part of a soldier’s regime – but still they fell, like a blackbird drawn to honey, like a dove speared from the heights. And when they fell, they brought the nightingale tumbling down with them. He was a human. A wretched one at that. For he had harkened for the pillaging of Stasya’s kind, those whom they considered kin and blood. Was the furs of war he wore not drenched in blood of those whom they had fought shoulder-to-shoulder with? Mere moments earlier there was not a doubt in their mind that he the wounds he suffered were recompense for the corpses that surrounded him. But, as the dark-haired Stasya held him in the cradle of their lap, they knew that hate could not find its way into their heart. And it never would.

Perhaps they should have despised one another, pummeled and slashed and resisted: but what was war but bringing of unpredictable destruction? Mortality is a fickle thing. Brevity was its lover, and momentary bliss the child that it bore. His wounds had healed quickly in the cells of the jail that they had brought him to, the wounds that the battle had ravaged on their heart quicker than that still. The moment that those two had shared upon a battlefield transcended the war-ravaged parts of their hearts that they were often told to listen to. In those weeks that they spent guarding him, interrogating him as kindly as they could, the warmth of the affection turned into the heat of unfettered love. Brief touches between the bars of a cage would do no longer and Fate had mercy upon them. That, or perhaps it cared to teach them that even a gentle creature like the dark-haired Stasya was not likely to escape the grasp of their cruelty. For, not but a week later, he was condemned. And, oh, how impossible it was for them to disguise their despair. How quickly the grave was dug, how unceremoniously was he taken from them. But mortality is also a delicate thing – the fluttering of a little bird’s heart in a womb, the knitting of the unthinkable in the dark. They wore their shame with pride – for if love was weakness, then they would gladly be stripped of their wings if only to afford their child a chance to fly.

CONNECTIONS

NEYSA RAI: Great is the comfort that may be taken in the kindness of a smile. In Neysa’s grin there seems to be an endless well of comfort that they can never get enough of. Stasya is never one to compare their own plight with that of others -- but in Neysa’s they steadfastly believe that there is no compare. The world has waged a war against the her, and Stasya is determined to raise their fist and bring the world to its knees in a tempest should anything ever happen to their beloved Neysa ever again. For whatever reason, fate seems keen on making martyrs of them all -- but such a journey is much more bearable when one has the hand of a friend to depend on. They may be martyrs, but they will give the stars a reckoning for their shared destinies yet. 

KATYA ARISTOV: The way that she seems to offer friend and foe a knife in the place of a flower is beyond Stasya. How anyone could harness such a hatred within their hearts is a sickness they will never be able to understand. That is what they see Katya as -- a temperamental child ridden with a sickness. When they offer her the medicine, all she does is make a face of disgust and turn away. They know this because they have tried many times to relieve the burden upon her soul, but the tundra of Fjerda has better chances of being razed in fire than Katya does of having some semblance of humanity in her soul. Yet they show her no bitterness, are not willing to return the anger in kind. For gentle is their ways and gentleness is the only thing they wish upon Katya’s ravaged soul. 

VASILY BARANOV: It is disconcerting, the way  he watches them. They are not a bird to be studied, a spectacle to be put in an exhibition and viewed. Whether he stares at the child they carry or at them, they are not entirely sure -- but they do not take kindly to the fascination that he suffocates them with. Whatever he wants from them, they are not entirely sure they can give him -- whether it be solace or reconciliation or comfort. Though his reasons may be chaste and his motives pure, they know that a lifestyle like the kind that he has cultivated for himself is not something that is easily shaken off. It is not something that they want to be associated with, but if the gossip about the court members have taught them anything, it is this -- whether he presents himself as friend or foe, they will try to know him in the former but will always see him as the latter. 

SHONA YUL-JUN

TWENTY-THREE ❈ SQUALLER THE ORDER OF SUMMONERS (ETHEREALKI)

* This character is trans and uses he/him pronouns.

Shona had no idea why he was the way he was, wild in an empty sort of way, at once the rush of a rapture and the silent aftermath of a hollow universe. Even as a child he was so, so much, a tiny catastrophe of tumultuous energy and too honest words born to a family of weary parents and siblings who grew up too fast, too soon. Looking back, he pitied his poor mother, who didn’t know how to handle a child who seemed to know more about vexing her than loving her, but she loved him all the same and wept when, one evening, he blew the sheets off his bed and shot them across the house in a shallow gust following a small temper when he refused to go to bed early. Shu Han was not kind to the likes of him, children who were as much offspring to the natural order of the earth as they were to their parents, and he remembered his family mourning long and softly at the foot of his bed. But Shona and his mother were similar in that inaction never suited either of them, and, with the help of a benevolent trader whose route took him through Ravka, she was able to send Shona to safety on the back of a caravan, packed among cheese and dried meats. For a while Shona, would be looked down upon in Ravka for being Shu, condescended to and distrusted; such was the nature of warring nations. Yet it was still better than what would happen to him if he remained. He cried when he left, and then once again when he was delivered to the orphanage in Keramzin, and then never again.

The Little Palace was as foreign a home as Ravka was, but Shona finally had the luxury of being as honest as he liked, in his words and in his capabilities, and the squaller became notorious for his biting tongue, his careless charisma, his complete disregard for anything that didn’t immediately capture his interest. He scoffed at the Grisha who lived permanently within the Palace, who fed their ego with the honor of being asked to stay; he laughed at all the hierarchies that had been eargerly laid out for him since he’d arrived—Grisha and humans, Grisha and other Grisha, Ravkans and Shu. “Simpletons with nothing better to occupy their thoughts than imagining up a caste,” he snorted once. No, he occupied his time not in politics, but by plunging deeper and deeper into the abyss of his art. To be powerful was to be autonomous, he thought, but the wind and he were alike in that attempting to establish total control over either—to force them into action rather than guiding their moving path, was to invite failure.

It was a lesson not easily learned in the comfortable confines of the Little Palace, and when he was sent to fight alongside the First Army towards the north rather than remain, he wasn’t particularly surprised. He still couldn’t summon a storm no matter how hard he tried or how shrilly his instructor commanded, and for as little as he let on about it, the struggle had been agonizing. But he fought, the biting cold alien to him, his spirits low, having been separated from what few friends he’d made at the Little Palace and forced to fight in weather and terrain he’d never known. It was one particularly trying night that the Fjerdans took advantage of a roaring blizzard and attacked, shifting in and out of the white void. One by one, soldiers fell at his side as he frantically wound and coiled winter winds around him like tendrils. White became red with blood, and he could feel his time running short as the desperation and frenzy he’d distanced himself from climbed the edges of his nerves and filled his vision. And he panicked, not as a soldier on a mission, but as a primitive thing trying to survive. A blinding light, a deafening crack, the smell of burning—and when he opened his eyes, all that was left was ash and the Darkling and his men, there to escort Shona back to the Little Palace among the rest of the Grisha who had earned the honor.

It is known that some of the most perilous storms have no meaning nor ghost within - they wreak disasters because they can, regardless of whether or not there’s a symbol or allegory to be found, and those who seek to find one will only get caught in the hurly burly. He is a masterpiece of smooth curves and unpredictable edges, sanded down by a merciless universe. But rather than mourn or seek vengeance, he much prefers to let the fervor of the tempest use him as much as he uses it, for he is as much a cog in the grand scheme of things as razing winds are to his agenda. His whims take him to and fro, from madness to reason, from lover to enemy, from nothing to everything. Claim the wind as your ally and watch as everything you love is swept away; claim it as your enemy and watch as your entire kingdom becomes dust. But leave it to its whims and fancies, and it may clear the rubble from your path.

CONNECTIONS

ARSEN TARASOV, VALERIAN PETROV & LUKA MRAVINSKY:  The closest thing to brothers as they could be without sharing his blood, they were a ragtag group of children who grew sharp and rough in each other’s company. Arsen, Valerian and Luka didn’t seem to care he was originally from Shu Han, and perhaps that was their mistake and his own blessing. But things have since changed drastically since their years spent growing in the Little Palace, and now they’ve all become jagged sovereigns of their own little kingdoms slipping from their fingers, all the while Shona strives to keep both of them grounded and tethered to what they’ve always known, to keep them all from losing themselves in the growing chaos.

ARINA ZAHKAROV: Like called to like, as oddities often did. Neither of them truly felt like they belonged, and neither of them cared enough to make an effort to assimilate to what their environment asked of them, and if there was anyone Shona could tolerate unconditionally aside from Valerian and Luka, it’s the little scholar with a taste for morbidity who’s never cared for the differences between them. He was never particularly taken with her projects or her art—he rarely was with anything that didn’t have to do his own—but her unapologetic passion captured his own, and he thinks she’s one of the few good things about the Little Palace.

FARID TERESHKIN: They met once years back during a Winter Fete, when he cast lightning to strike the center of the Palace courtyard and the Count caught his gaze just as the light was beginning to fade. He never cared much for titles nor nobility, as anyone with the former usually treated him poorly despite depending on a Grisha’s service most, but Farid didn’t much care for traditions nor propriety. He supposes things could be worse than to be treated like a prized dancing monkey and, on many occasions, a personal rent boy, in exchange for honeyed treats and gifts of gold (that he’s only ever thrown in a heap in his closet), but he’s never been one to deny himself a distraction nor a momentary pleasure.

SERGEI VALKE

TWENTY-SEVEN ❈ HUMAN DRÜSKELLE

He was raised with the wolves—taught their savage ways and shown what it is to survive on the remnants of what should’ve been, and it came as little surprise when he grew older and became one, cold as ice and twice as sharp. Sergei Valke was the sixth of eight children, cast aside and utterly forgotten even by those responsible for his very existence, and he became the sort of independent that seldom leads children anywhere they want to go. He was a good son when he wanted to be and a bad son when he damn well shouldn’t have been, and his father’s scolding, though it provided a semblance of the attention he’d craved like air for years, did little to dissuade him. He had nothing to lose from the time he learned what, exactly, that meant, and he made it abundantly clear—to his parents, to his siblings, and most of all, to himself, that he owed nothing to the family that had given him nothing in return. A peasant boy with no real knowledge of the world except for how it bit, he struck out on his own the first chance he got, armed with little more than a stolen kitchen knife, one of the pups that loved to nip at his heels, and his own steel nerve, and though he could never be sure what he was looking for, he was gifted with the certainty that wherever it was, he’d find it. His childhood was marked by the winters he’d endured, but one would find that his were remarkably few when he became a man. This was the making of a soldier; this was the unbecoming of a boy.

It was the hand of fate, or perhaps the work of a higher power, that led him to the Ice Court, a scraggly boy and his scraggly wolf-dog caught stealing and spared their hands, but only just. He’d made a life of it, of taking what wasn’t his and running with it, and though he knew, deep down, that it was wrong—for his mother’s preaching had never left him, even as he left her—he couldn’t bring himself to deem himself a sinner, to throw himself down at the feet of his superiors and beg for forgiveness they’d never been taught how to forgive. It was his stubbornness that saved him, the sort of salvation whose weight can prove grounding in one instance and crushing in the next, and he was sworn in as a trainee that same night, under the penalty of death and dishonor. He would become a drüskelle, this lost boy, this rotten soul—or he would die trying. It was a fate he refused to accept for months, fighting nearly every order they gave him like the beasts they sought to train—wild-eyed, teeth bared, reckless in the way all wild things are. But he was a natural, whether he realized it or not—seemingly born and cast out for the sole purpose of filling the void left by all those who had gone before him, and he played his role well. His resilience, when molded into the sort of devotion gods create whole worlds in search of, earned him the favor of his commanders even as he tried to spite them, and in two short years—the briefest training period of any soldier to come through the compound in generations—he became a man his father would’ve been proud to know, had he been given the privilege.

But there was a high price to pay for such an honor, and Sergei Valke would spend the rest of his life trying to even the score. The drüskelle were hand-picked by their god himself to carry out his bidding, but theirs was a righteous god, a spirit who believed in humility and the natural order, and thus, the same was demanded of the men who served in his name. The life of a drüskelle was not at all glamorous—quite the contrary; he spent his days patrolling the compound and the outlying villages, with fatigue clinging to his bones and the sort of hunger no amount of spiritual reward could dispel gnawing at him from the inside out. What he did in the dark, though, was enough to make a grown man shudder—or it would have been, had he not been enlightened, shown the truth in the fractured light of dozens of bitterly cold mornings. They were unnatural, the men and women they hunted—abominations and enemies of the truth, and they were to be done away with at any and all cost. He robbed so many families of their children that he lost count—stole them from their beds, tore them from their mothers’ arms, and burned them like reverse martyrs on the pyre, but his own sins were lost on him, drowned in tainted holy water and buried under the weight of false divinity. The Grisha were but sacrificial lambs in his mismatched eyes, and little more; he was doing his duty as a soldier, a Fjerdan, and little more. He could stand tall knowing that if one day he had to answer for the crimes he’d committed against his own kind, he would have nothing to fear but the notion that he hadn’t done enough.

It was honor that drove him from his homeland’s embrace to the hearth of his sworn enemies—to Ravka, on a mission unlike any he’d ever been on but one eerily familiar just the same. Young boys dream of the day they’ll set out on a hunt of this caliber, and he, too, allowed himself to be a little struck by it all—a bolt of lightning straight to his fiercely beating heart. But the novelty of being handpicked to be the harbinger of all things holy has worn off, replaced with a somber sort of acceptance, the knowledge that every day he remains, he takes one step closer to blasphemy, one step closer to the abyss. He is not here to make merry, to admire the sights and play nice like a good ambassador should; he is here to set Ravka ablaze, to make of it a funeral pyre for the world to see—to make of it an example. This is what happens when you break the laws of nature, when you let your people play god—wrath, fury, oblivion. And in rode death on a pale horse.

CONNECTIONS

GEMMA PAVLOVA:  She’s Ravka’s best-kept secret, its prized blade waiting to be sharpened, and he’s made it his personal mission to make sure she breathes her last before she ever lays her pretty blue eyes on the Shadow Fold. It’s ambitious, he knows, but there’s no time to waste or effort to be spared when dealing with what the enemy seems to think may be a fighting chance, a living saint. Let them call out her name as she burns, the first in a long line of martyrs for his cause; let them turn their eyes toward the sun as he reduces their kingdom to ash. He’ll destroy her in the holiest of ways, and the world will neglect to thank him for it; such is the unsung tragedy of heroes. 

OYUN KIR-NARAN: The only thing his people and the Shu have ever had in common is their profound hatred of Ravkans, but he and the diplomat can’t even enjoy such small pleasures, a small tragedy owing to the fact that he’s undercover and she comes—so she claims—in the name of peace, as if peace can be won by anything less than conquering, than spilling blood for honor’s sake. He’s seen the way she looks at him, the way she seems to see right through his facade, but he’s nothing if not determined, and he’d sooner die—or see to it that she precedes him—than let a half-hearted enemy be the end of him. He was trained by men who knew not what lukewarm was, taught that the only two acceptable extremes were scalding and freezing, fire and ice; there’s only room at court for one of them to be so cold.

ISKRA RAEVSKY: She’s a pain, that one—the sort his brothers would’ve put an end to on sight, with no hope of a trial she could talk her way out of and no chance of her turning her stake into a wildfire. But his position leaves him with no choice but to be subtle, and fortunately for him, subtlety is utterly lost on her, the crown prince’s very own hand grenade in a royal guard’s uniform, and as it turns out, nearly everything is. She was chosen for her fire, not for her intellect, and she’s unwittingly made it known through nearly every word she says. There’s much to be done with a fire that burns with what seems to be no direction; he’ll make use of her yet.

OYUN KIR-NARAN

TWENTY-FIVE ❈ HUMAN DIPLOMAT

In war-torn lands, there existed what felt like a collective fantasy among those who’d known what silvery and genteel elegance was like before it was stolen from them, a sense of hope that lived not in the abstract, but in an image of nostalgia. It lived in Oyun, a girl who only knew how to be coveted, a woman who knew only how to work in machinations. She was heralded as a living miracle as soon as she came to be, delivered swiftly and safely despite the odds working against her and her mother, although she knew few would think of how she must have fought for her survival, with teeth and claws and nerve; it made a far less pretty picture than the image of her dropped into the world after a quick hiccup. Life was gilded after. Her parents were not nobles, but they were respected and illustrious citizens, a family of strategists and advisers and scholars, and with it came along a privilege Oyun neither took for granted nor inflated. Dresses of silk that might have befit royalty, lessons in manners, philosophy, and dance, the advantage of having Shu Han’s celebrated intellectuals drop in and out of their villa for simple tea and highbrow conversation. They never minded Oyun as she played a melody on an instrument in the background, perhaps because they assumed she wasn’t listening or was absorbed in her own preoccupations, perhaps they couldn’t imagine the reason she excused herself was so she could quickly run to her study and jot down all her favorite words and idioms and ideas they discussed before they slipped from her mind. Sometimes the most erudite didn’t need to have all the nation’s resources at their fingertips—sometimes gleaning and taking what she liked and discarding the rest was enough.

Color oneself in a flower’s hues, let the swaying of one’s petals bely the venom in its roots. Oyun joined countless other well-bred girls whose blood wasn’t quite gilded enough to be royalty but whose parents were of good enough standing for their daughters to serve those who were. It was a coveted opportunity for those who imagined the nobility to have reason to look down upon the common folk—how grand to be in the company of royalty. And perhaps Oyun would have been starstruck at the thought as well, but what was the point of fawning if it was solely blood that determined stature? These crowned idols had nothing but fortune as their allies, and fortune ran out - Oyun had their favor, her wits and her ability to change; a less than noble birth allowed her that freedom, and freedom marked her apart. She was assigned to be the aide of the cousin or niece of the queen—she could barely remember now, but her name was Saran: a nice, but rather melodramatic girl who spun her dark locks round her fingers and dreamed rather than did. There was nothing to be said for the hapless, excepting that they could serve their use at the hands of another. She listened to Saran, penned her love letters and cooed over the girl’s decisions and indecision as if they were groundbreaking rather than grating, and waited until Saran simply opened the doors Oyun had been itching to unlock. Secrets and gossip and blueprints of those who ruled the kingdom - she created labyrinths of her own with those outlines and sketches, curried her own favor with nobles with what she’d learned and what they offered her for her own. There was prestige in beauty, but even greater in knowing how to use it. It wasn’t that she wanted power, or to become queen; she wanted exactly everything she deserved.

Then, Oyun found her ally in fortune, although lesser folk might have called it trouble. She and a guard were accompanying Saran to the northernmost parts of Shu Han—for what, she couldn’t remember either—but they were intercepted by Ravkan brutes who sought a Shu noble to take as a hostage, presumably Saran’s safety in exchange for pulling out Shu forces out of a Ravkan region, or something equally trite. The soldiers had them on their knees, in the dirt, as they sent a messenger to the Shu Han capital, fed them sparsely in the interim and taunted them often in hopes of breaking them. Initially it seemed best to keep quiet in the face of barbarians, to go the route of Saran and play dumb and not incite further stupidity, but as time went on and their fate remained uncertain with still no word from the capital, it was clear varied tactics were needed. “Write a new message,” she’d demanded, voice clear despite having not had water in twelve hours. “I’ll teach you how to be persuasive.” In the letter she’d listed every noble who had any sort of clout and their vices, from who they preferred to sleep with despite who their spouse was to what they liked to spend tax revenue on despite their own public declarations and promises. You’re not hitting them where it hurts - the queen’s cousin? They will mourn for a month and continue with their depravity. Not a day later they were back in the capital, and Oyun was praised for her ingenuity, for not only negotiating her own safety but the safety of her mistress. No sins were leaked, and she received a new appointment to make sure they would remain that way: diplomat to Ravka. That is, the carrier to the spark that would raze Ravka to the ground.

Women who carried an old-world, genteel elegance about them learn to hide their fangs and frays behind velvet words and a beauty to rival the willows and silks of the world, to smile as often as she seethes. She looks like a waking daydream, walks like rolling fog, speaks like wind chimes, and schemes like the Devil’s favorite. Her ambition is a selfish kind, unrelenting and unapologetic, but cleverly hidden until it isn’t. The world is teeming with dreamers, cowards who never dare to do, and she coos at them, strokes their hair and sings them to sleep, and takes what is hers while the lesser slumber. She is a wolf in swan’s feathers, gliding alongside the sheep until all that is left between her and calamity is a thin, laced veil.

CONNECTIONS

MAKSIM KAEV:  There’s nothing more delightful than knowing something so crucial about a celebrated man who's entrenched in ignorance. The good lieutenant who took to leadership like a falcon took to the sky, a man unquestionably Ravkan - what would people think if they knew he was Shu? That he was abandoned because he was disgraceful and his family only foresaw further embarrassment, that he was sent to Ravka to destroy them by misguiding them in his incompetence? Oyun still hasn’t decided when she’ll tell him or how, but she’s perfectly satisfied dangling a morsel in front of him and watching a man of such good standing snap at it like a feral animal - it’s her favorite kind of power.

TATIANA LANTSOV: She reminds Oyun too much of the mistress she used to serve, but her own brand of wrath is something the diplomat can commend - and use, as undignified as it was. She takes the lady-in-waiting to be narcissistic and predictable - whether or not she’s easy to maneuver, to coax into opening the doors that were previously locked to Oyun is entirely up to Oyun’s mood and whims. It would be all to easy to reach the Lantsovs through Tatiana and unearth that which has been buried - and history does love to repeat itself.

SERGEI VALKE: Like drew to like, and Oyun could spot a mask as easily as she could slip one on. There’s something about the man that seems off, and she has never doubted herself before, even as others accept him unequivocally. Listen closely, she tells herself. Sometimes his idioms and expressions were strange, sometimes he made the very same grammar mistakes she made when she was first learning the language, and she is not content to write off these idiosyncrasies. She will be there when the mask cracks, even if she must be the one to step on it with her heel.

RITA JAKOV

TWENTY TWO ❈ TAILOR ORDER OF THE LIVING & THE DEAD (CORPORALKI)

She was a field of daisies reaching for the sun, bright and soft and pure; she was a laugh in the wake of a tragedy, the first storm after a drought, the last rays of sunlight spilling over a horizon in dire need of the stars. She was everything beautiful and good in the world—an angel, or perhaps a lamb bred for the slaughter, and it would be her undoing; it would. Born to a mother who collected pretty things like trophies, Rita Jakov was never meant to be anything less than a doll on a wooden shelf, something to be admired and safely tucked away. She grew like the wildflowers did, half-savage and half-wonder, and though her world was small, she carved her own heaven out of it—crowned herself the queen of the little village she called home. The countryside became a kingdom, a canvas, a dreamland of her own making, and the little Jakov girl became the daughter her mother had always hoped she’d be: humble, kind, and perhaps a bit mysterious, too—the type of woman who was loved by all who knew her but understood by none. She was an enigma, this girl with stars in her eyes and petals in her hair, and for much of her childhood, she remained that way: adored, but held at arm’s-length; indulged, but with the sort of wariness reserved for witches and phantoms. She was beautiful in the way of all things tragically misunderstood, and for all that she loved the world despite this transgression, she ached for it, too.

The understanding she’d longed for came in the form of a mistake, a coincidence; later, they’d tell her it was fate—like calls to like, as sure and true as the sun is to rise and set—but she’d been raised to believe there was no such thing, no invisible hand to guide her where it felt she ought to go. The stars and their foolish whims had no sway in the life of a girl who could paint a grey world a hundred different shades with a mere curve of her lips—about that, her mother had been adamant. Thus, she was born anew of her own volition entirely, though her transformation, as is the case with butterflies and swans and the creatures for which beauty waits, was hardly easy and far from simple. She was a late bloomer, the very last of her peers to be plucked from their own brands of obscurity, and it showed—in the way she carried herself, in the way they looked at her, and even in what, exactly, she was. A mystery doesn’t lose its allure simply because it’s given a name, and in much the same way, Rita Jakov remained something yet to be understood even as she was welcomed into the fold of the Small Science, a Grisha girl instead of a mere commoner, but only just. She was an anomaly among anomalies, a practitioner with abilities as tangled as her roots, and though she could’ve been one or the other—a Corporalnik or a Materialnik, an engineer of the earth or the body—she instead became both: tailor, they called her, and it felt like coming home.

In a world where beauty is paramount and honesty is dangerous, her services were highly sought after and hard-earned; monsters so love to be made to look as though they’re anything but. And love her they did—like Midas loved his gold, like air; it went to her head, this superficial adoration—made her a hollow shell of a girl where she’d once been whole, a porcelain doll with no ambition but this: to make everything beautiful. It was something of an obsession, this need to see a war-torn kingdom glitter, its people’s scars wiped clean and the crevices that remained filled with gold—damn near madness, those who’d known her as a girl might say. She became so beautiful it hurt, and when she could do no more, she went further, indulging every whim and desire of those affluent enough to seek her help. She was greedy in her longing for love, for praise; it kept her up at night, drove her to become someone the happy girl she’d once been would cower before, but the only thing left untouched by her avarice, it seemed, was her heart. Beneath it all—beneath her marbled skin and behind eyes of striking blue, there lived a hopeful girl who still believed there was beauty to be found in war, in destruction, in devastation. Naive though she might’ve been, she wasn’t wrong, and perhaps that was the worst of it: that beauty wasn’t what she’d thought at all, that it was a bloody, ruthless thing with claws and teeth—and that she wanted it desperately still.

She has stopped looking for it in war’s cruel wake—has stopped searching the eyes of those she serves for anything more than despair, has accepted that there are some marks even she can’t erase—and it terrifies her, knowing that the enemy draws closer with each passing day and that the only flag she has to wave is a blinding, blood-speckled white. To look death in the face and have no choice but to smile back a surrender is cruelty unrivaled, a curse all too often afforded to the undeserving, and she, too, is a victim, with her heart of fool’s gold and her pretty little head a tad too close to the clouds. She has never been a soldier—has never felt the weight of a gun in her hands or the snap of bone beneath her knuckles, but she once believed she could fight the war another way, that if she could just make everything beautiful, the world might stop trying to tear itself apart. But years of trying have shown her the truth, snarling and savage and ugly: beautiful things may still be cruel, may still feel sorrow, may still collapse. Beauty is a ruse, is a trap, is a lie those left behind console themselves with when they’ve nothing left to hold. Beauty is poison, and vanity is disease; beauty is poison, and so is she.

CONNECTIONS

MARGARETE STARIKOV: She underestimated her at first, the little Starikov girl; she took one look at the Corporalnik’s delicate likeness and saw a younger Grisha to take under her wing, a sister she’d always longed for but never had as a girl, and this, she now knows, was a dangerous mistake to make. But the damage, it seems, has already been done; she snuck in like an illness of the worst sort, showed the tailor glimpses of the darkest parts of her like memories, like dreams, and try as she might, Rita can’t bring herself to forget them. You’d look better in red, darling; all deadly things do.

ARSEN TASAROV: Cruel—it’s written all over him, burned into his smile like a brand, and she’s borne the worst of it, his taunting and sharp teeth. She’d never known a man of fire could have the capacity to be so cold-hearted, but he is—in everything he does, in everything he says. You’re not one of us; you never were, and you never will be. She could patch herself up if she wanted—grow flowers in the places he’s cut her deep—but some pain, she knows, isn’t so easily sated. This singed boy, this destroyer of hearts; this courageous girl, this creator of wonder. If he wants a war, he’ll have one, but it’ll be on her terms.

TATIANA LANTSOV: They’d called her hungry, and she hadn’t known what such hunger entailed until she met her in all her glory, never-bouncy-enough curls askew and cherry-red lips always parted. She was the first person Rita Jakov hadn’t quite known what to do with, and telling her so had only fueled the fire in the young girl’s eyes. Make me perfect, she’d demanded, fickle fingers wrapped around one of many chocolates she’d greedily kept for herself. And she’d tried—she really had, but the beauty she brings is only skin-deep, and the flaws the Lantsov woman had wouldn’t prove so easily corrected. But for all that she’s faced the younger girl’s wrath a number of times for her perceived failures, the tailor continues to see her, not out of necessity, but humility. Here is a woman she hopes to never become; may she learn by example.

NEYSA RAI

TWENTY ONE ❈ HEARTRENDER ORDER OF THE LIVING & THE DEAD (CORPORALKI)

She’s been running for as long as she can remember, a girl born for leaving and a penchant for staying gone. For the better half of her young life, she was little more than a memory—wind-loved and sun-worshipped, a bramble rose that never truly took root, and she owes it to her family, to her people, for instilling within her the grace that allowed her to survive so long. They were a peaceful people, the Suli—a band of men and women who’d been spared the curse of desperately wanting to belong—and she was their blessing, their gift, the closest thing to a saint they’d ever had in their midst. Rebe, they called her: daughter—of the wind, of the earth, of their hearts. She and her brother were treasured among them where they might’ve been shunned—guarded where they might’ve been given up, and as such, they were spared from discovery and conscription into the Second Army, tucked into the back of a wagon when the hooded strangers came in search of their kind. It was there, pressed against her sibling beneath a pile of moth-eaten blankets, that she grew fearful of what she truly was—a weapon, elusive and dangerous and deadly enough for an Army to seek out. They were safe, the child of the sea and the girl who spoke the language of hearts, and for a time, she tried to let herself believe they always would be. But her days of hiding and hoping and praying to saints she wasn’t sure were listening were far from over that warm spring morning; they’d only just begun.

They were by the sea when the world came crashing down on their heads, and no amount of power—no twisting of heartstrings and no calling of tidal waves—could save them. What once sustained them had set them apart; Aarvas’s asking the tides to dance had captured the attention of a slaver moving into port, and Neysa’s moving to defend him with little more than her bare hands, outstretched and shaking, had sealed their fate. Life as they’d known it ended on a hot summer’s day, with no mourners to speak of but the whisper of the waves and the cries of a lone seagull, as is expected for two children with no home but each other; the girl she’d once been died on her knees with her head held high, her hands tied behind her back and her pinky finger entwined with her sibling’s, and the girl she became never spoke of her again—out of fear, out of respect, out of longing. Time moved not in days and minutes, but in dreams and memories—a braid of raven feathers falling down her mother’s back, the sway of prairie grasses in the warm light of dawn, the heaviness that came with leaving a place and the lightness that came with knowing there would always be another. A girl taught to interpret dreams found herself utterly lost when she could no longer distinguish between nightmares and waking, and for years, this was her life: a shadow of what it once was, a never-ending night under a sky devoid of the stars she’d known by name.

But hope has a funny way of finding its way through the cracks, and against all odds, the two Suli children found a friend in the city they’d come to loathe. The streets of Ketterdam had long been a hostile place for Grisha to roam, pockmarked as they were by the scars of gang rivalries and anti-Grisha sentiment as thick as smoke, but each year, as the leaves turned from green to gold to dust, they became a haven of anonymity, a home to every figment of lonely children’s imaginations and every poor fellow who longed to join them. But this particular autumn, they were an escape for a pair of Grisha indentures that had never been indentured at all, a sharp set of blades on which to cut their bonds. They ran in plain sight, two masked figures fleeing the crowds after the outbreak of a liquor-fueled riot, and robbed of the opportunity to do so when they’d been captured, and safely aboard a Ravkan trade ship Aarvas had volunteered to guide, they watched the one place they’d never been able to make a home of fade from view—but never, it seemed, from their memories. The nightmares they’d lived haunted her nightly even after they were once again on Ravkan soil, and they only worsened when she and her brother enlisted in the Second Army as both a penance and a price—shadowed figures strangling her in the dark, the bodies of innocents strewn about at her feet. In her dreams, she forgot how to tell the difference between a monster and a man.

In the months since she’s arrived at the Little Palace, she’s learned that sometimes, there isn’t one. Having escaped one noose only to entangle herself in another, she doubts she’ll ever outrun her ghosts, memories of the life she was forced to leave behind, but every sin has its recompense, and perhaps this is hers: to become, bit by bit, a woman she doesn’t recognize—a weapon in the hands of a king not unlike the masters she once served. She doesn’t remember what it feels like to be truly free, and as long as there are wars to win and empires to topple, perhaps she never will. All the more reason, she supposes, to soldier on. One day, she’ll reconcile the image of the war-torn girl in the mirror with the hopeful child she once was. One day, she’ll convince herself that everything she’s done has been just. But until then, she fights, half-blade and half-girl. When is a monster not a monster, you ask? Oh, when it’s given no other choice.

CONNECTIONS

AARVAS RAI: Her father once told her that when they were young, a prick of her sibling’s finger would draw tears from her own eyes, a tether few understood and none dared to sever. She was made to protect them, body and soul—in this life and the next, and she’d sooner return herself to the chains they’ve been freed from than see them suffer. They are two halves of the same whole, the push and pull of the tide against the shore, and where one goes, the other will surely follow—through hell and back, into the thick of battle, home. Let this war take her pride, her morals, her hopes, her dreams—but saints save the one who tries to take them.

STASYA BELOV: They are gentle—a breeze where they might’ve been a twister, kind where they might’ve been cruel, and she finds solace in them, in their courageous sort of sweetness. She’s found something akin to a kindred spirit in the squaller, a soldier to call friend, and no stranger to shame herself, she’s offered her own weathered shoulders to share the burden of their storms. The world has made martyrs of them both, but she knows—perhaps better than anyone—that martyrs often come in pairs. In her smile lies a promise: you’ll never have to go it alone.

VALERIAN PETROV: She sees in him everything she desperately hopes to never become—a fanatic, a killer, a fire raging out of control. He wasn’t always this way—at least, that’s what she’s been told; it was the war that made him the inferno he is, and it will be the war that burns him for all he’s got, a candle melted down to the end of the wick. Never one to be a savior for anyone but her own flesh and blood, Neysa might be content to let him burn up in his own flames, had he not reached out and tried to drag her in with him. “Left your backbone in Kerch, did you?” He sneered once, voice haughty and words blistering. “Perhaps you should’ve left your heart, too.” He doesn’t know what he’s asking for, this man of ash and fire; he mustn’t know what a death wish it is to tempt a woman who could burst his heart in his chest. But sometimes, as she watches him raze whole cities to the ground like a man in search of something he’ll never get back, she thinks, perhaps, he might. 

RHEA TERESHKIN

TWENTY-FIVE ❈ HUMAN THE ROYAL COURT | COUNTESS

The idea of being extraordinary has always been just out of reach for her – it is a reflection in the water that wavers just as she grows close, threatening to dispel completely. It is less substantial than a memory, for she has never known what extraordinary tastes like; how it might sit and taste upon the tip of one’s tongue. Would she be able to savor it like something delicate and sweet? Or would it coat her tongue completely, until she knew nothing but its everlasting flavor? But she would never know – it was a fact that her parents did not mind telling her. They told her it so often, so very often, that it was the first thought that greeted her before the light of the morning sun and bid her good night as she closed her eyes to the light of the moon. Little Rhea was nothing that could be mistaken as exceptional, astounding, or a creature of phenomena. She was a rose in a garden that teemed with an abundance of rose bushes. She was a daisy in a meadow full of the bright, yellow flowers. Though her parents tried to school her, oh how they tried. They bought the best tutors that Ravka had to offer, tried to teach her how to make her voice as tempting as a siren’s, or perhaps teach her how to move the way the Suli women do – so lithely, so gracefully as if every step is an unfinished dance. They tried to mold her into something with potential, but there came a time where they lay their chiseling tools aside and had no choice but to stare at the unfinished sculpture of disenchantment that was their plain daughter.

Little did they know that every slight was a cut that she picked at until it became a scar. Every curl of the lip, bat of the eye, and contemptuous brow was received with little more than a quiet duck of her head. But they did not see how her fists clenched so tight into her palms that she had no choice but to wipe away the spots of blood so blithely, so deftly. Although her parents did not have many teachings to offer her – for no teachings could be found between the words that taught her a lesson she knew all too well; she was a disappointment – she was more than able to teach herself the worth of one’s own ambition. It began with the multiplicity of tutors that lay at her disposal. She spent hours in her room, holed up with nothing but the candlelight and the company of books as the moon hung high in the sky. Her lessons were tedious and by no means easy – she scrabbled with those words like an impish thief of a child, trying to glean some coin from a man who had a knife in his pocket. Which is to say, the words did not lay themselves before her as easily as they did for others, but eventually she began to coax them into submission. Then there were the lessons of her song – and oh how she dreaded them. But she began to coax value out of those as well, for is not the different languages and accents new melodies to the same song? Eventually she learned how to move like a lady – not quite like a dancer, but it was enough to entice some suitors to her parlor door.

She was never going to be worthy of the opinion of her parents, but she was worthy enough for herself. Though she was still a rose in a garden that was lush with them – she would at least rest easy knowing that her thorns were the sharpest. So, she thought, might as well make sure they are sharp enough to draw blood. And she did, making her parents bleed the gold that they had accumulated over the years, hoarding it like dragons that knew not the size of their cavern and the proportions of their hoard. Oh, how she longed to see them smothered in it, suffocated by their own greed. They knew not how fixedly she would listen as traders and mercenaries passed through the doors of their great house, of how she soon became a more cunning trader than her father could hope to be. He knew the power of money, but he did not know the power of loyalty. All it took was a couple of words to her favorite servant boy, who shared the bed of one of her father’s partners when his wife was away. He lowered his prices so quickly, so drastically, that one might have thought a demon itself had appeared to him and taken his money away. How astounded her parents had been when fortune had fallen upon their house, as if the god of trade had offered them a special blessing. But the only god that could be found was their disenchanted daughter, who they hid in the corner room.

Imagine the wrath that this god laid upon them once her name was no longer tied to theirs. Useless, they had hissed at her as she sat at the table – head bowed with the weight of their disappointment, as plain as the dirt we step upon and as stupid as it too. So she showed them just how plain and stupid she could be, tearing from them all the gold and riches that they had once lavished in. The sympathies of her fellow courtiers became as invaluable to her as the coins which she had stolen, her tears and grievings at the loss of her parents a mask that hid the defiant smile which she longed to wear. They had taught her lessons of pain and despair, but even in their deaths they did not realize the weapons they had handed her. For, who could expect small, useless, disenchanted Rhea to truly be worth something other than being a lamb that ought to be slaughtered? Ah, if only they could have seen the lioness that lay beneath the softness of the white wool, the teeth that were hidden by a gentle, quiet mouth. It is a particular sort of pain, an ache that stains the soul, that truly shapes the likes of gods and goddesses. Pain is the only language they know, and it is the most familiar on her tongue. She greets it like an intimate friend. Why does one suppose that the gods demand brutal payment in the form of blood? Blood alone unbinds divinity.

CONNECTIONS

FARID TEREHSKIN: There are worse wolves that lambs like she could be wed to. Her parents had been won by the size of his fortune, where she was not able to be won by him at all. She supposes that in their years of marriage, if it could be called even that, they have come to an implicit understanding -- for, such is the way of lions and wolves. Bite and scratch and growl though they might, they are both predators and in that one commonality a certain amount of respect is understood. Although in the court’s eye, she defers to him like a zealot at his altar, there is to be no mistaking that she is as much as a creature to be deified as he. His first mistake was believing that the girl that was offered to him could be tamed, his second was believing that Ravka could worship more than one god. His third, and likely most damning mistake, was believing that their marriage was a game, with Ravka as their chessboard. Stupid man, thinking that he was a contender to begin with. 

VASILY BARANOV: She had taught herself to never let anyone, other than her own reflection, see her flinch. Unfortunately, such self-made promises are rather difficult to keep in mind when swept away by the drunken fervor that one’s first fling often entails. She had allowed herself a moment, a singular night, to indulge in something other than her iron will. It had been quite a safe bet too, considering that there was supposed to be not one, but two oceans between them. One more nefarious than the other. But since she has no choice but to deal with his persistent presence in the court, she supposed that she might as well make the best of it and practice her hand at the much-revered art of blackmail. The court has begun to become a rather exciting place, so why not thrown in her own dice too? 

LUKA MRAVINSKY: She has seen the fealty with which the one pyro has served the Crown Prince, how she beckons at his every call -- ready to spill blood like a drunkard spilling wine when the situation demands it. Rhea wants that and more, she wants a soldier so indebted and taken by her that all she had to do was wish it and it be granted. All the courtiers have someone in their pocket, Grisha and human alike, so she is beginning to feel rather desperate -- as if everyone wears armor but her. It is not with malice she hunts him, but with a rather desperate desire for her own protection. She can see the tenderness of his soul, it is one that she hopes to foster one day in herself, but if he will not respond to the call of a woman who is worn, then she will have no option but to force him to. 

MAKSIM KAEV

TWENTY-THREE ❈ HUMAN THE ROYAL COURT | LEIUTENANT

He was a child swaddled in unkindness, having been conceived in nothing but the most unfortunate of circumstances for those who fall in love with words whispered in the comfort of the night. He could not blame his mother for her naivety, her heart more suited for truth and romance rather than the harshness of deception and reality. She was nothing more than a simple maiden, a beautiful country flower that the Shu Han crooned over -- a poem or two made in her honor. But his father? He should have known better, he should have known that love was nothing more than a fleeting fantasy whereas truths and values were ingrained in the conceptions of thoughts, in the voices that guided the heart. When they fell in love it seemed that the stars themselves had blessed the union -- but what are stars? They are nothing more than swaths of cosmic memories, of wishes that had risen and burned brightly -- only to be turned to ashes. She was born a dreamer; his father was born an opportunist. Between the two there could be no reconciliation, and the court of the Shu Han saw it much the same way. When they discovered that a peasant had conceived of something they believed to be too-good for her womb to bear, they sneered and spat upon the dirt she walked on. So he was branded a bastard, an err, a dishonored descendant of the Yul-Erdene name.

She sought to make him something better, something more than the mistake that they thought him to be. That his father thought him to be. He sought out the aid of heartrenders, of dark-hearted healers to rectify the mistake that he had made in a night of earnest. But his mother had bared her teeth, hackles raised in defense of the babe that kicked in her womb. It was as if he knew that from his very conception he had to fight -- fight for every moment where his heart beat in tandem with the woman who carried him. But even such restless hearts must be torn apart for the sake of their safety. Maksim did not remember what it felt like, to be waylaid upon a stranger’s doorstep and left upon the doorstep of an orphanage on a night where the winds howled and the moon itself hid behind the darkness of the clouds. Though he howled loudly enough to rival the likes of the wind itself, it was not until the night after that the keepers of Keramzin dared to open their door, only to find an infant half-dead upon their porch. Yet never have the keepers of Keramzin fallen in love as quickly as these ones did once they laid their eyes upon the brown eyes of the child that stared up at them -- half in suspicion and half in wonder. When he opened his mouth, they sighed in affection and when his first word fell from his lips as melodically as a song, they cooed in absolute adoration. 

He could have risen through the ranks of the army much the same way, relying upon his looks and charisma. But he was driven by the singular motivation of the dishonor that he suffered each and everyday in the orphanage -- oh how they laughed at the sheer foreignness of him. The way that his tongue lilted upon certain letters, the way in which he looked so alien to them all. Then, as clearly as he heard the whispers of the other orphans, he heard a voice when he rose and when he fell asleep, nothing more than a whisper yet still venomous in the way that it delivered its message: dishonored.  It became his mantra, his drive. The thing with which he was reminded of each time he tasted his own blood on his lips, the echo each time a blow colored his porcelain skin in splashes of purple, black, and blue. They did not know of this, of course, the soldiers that flocked to him like eyes did to a northern star. His soldiers stared upon him so loyally, so faithfully, as if they were nothing more than apostles to a saint. Why they did, he was not sure, but all he knew was the faint memory of a song he once heard: make them burn, Jianjun, make them burn. So he did -- with his words that drew blood, with his words that could have rivaled the sun itself with its burning, burning, burning. 

Ravka itself had to bow to him, he was their rising Sankt in word and deed. He rose like the embers of a flame, as effortlessly as if the wind itself was keen on raising it to the heavens, calling it ever higher. Soon, he found himself serving at the foot of the king, the politics of the court as easy for him to acclimate to as the mountains to a new season. Mountains did not shift in their stance, though everything else changes around them. Trees revealed their greenery, flowers bloomed amid the spring air -- but did the countenance of the mountain itself ever change? No, not ever. So he knew it to be with the court, changing their agendas as easily as snakes shedding their skin -- soon, he knew, the king would bow to the likes of him. Everything else changed about him, but he? The protective mountain of Ravka? No. No, he would never change. But...but did the worth of the mountain change when it revealed it was hiding stashes of gold, of gems, of iron? He thought himself to be a child of Ravka, a Ravkan of flesh and blood. But though his blood may be red, as red as the Ravkan soldiers that spilt their blood upon the battle field time and time again....who is to say that it is Ravkan?

CONNECTIONS

KONSTANTIN MIRONOV:  Loathing was not something that Maksim did often -- although it was something he did rather well. He did it gracefully, he did it humbly with his tongue between his teeth and his jaw set ever so slightly. Most people assumed that it was because he had a superior, everyone knew that the Mironov man did not work well under the authority of others. Although, he was the best soldier that the army had produced -- no, this hatred came from somewhere else, this hatred came from his heart. There was something tainted about Konstantin that Maksim knew lurked behind the poised exterior. Konstantin preached about honor, yet Maksim was quite sure that the meaning of the word was lost on him. There is nothing honorable about what a man’s been through -- what’s honorable is the way he’s shaped by it. From what Maksim has witnessed, Konstantin is being shaped into more of a demon than a Sankt.

ANASTASIA LANTSOV: There is something perpetually odd about the Lantsov child. Maksim does not judge them for it, no, but he finds his curiosity ever piqued by their odd ways. The way that they flit about the court like a bird looking for a branch upon which they wish to perch. The way that they laugh like a birdsong, but the moment they turn away it’s as silent as the graves of the soldiers. They make conversation like an artist in love -- which is to say, beautifully, almost magically. But then, when one tries to actually approach them, questions poised on the tip of their tongue, it’s as if Anastasia’s lips are sewn shut. Maksim isn’t sure of what secret they’re hiding, whether it is something duplicitous or a something more frivolous -- like a forbidden love affair -- but either way he wants to make sure that they know secrets spill more often than blood in the Ravkan court.

OYUN KIR-NARAN : He does not like the way he looks at her, as if she has a diamond, made specifically for him, and is choosing to withhold it. She is so frustratingly lofty in the way that she handles him, this diplomat from Shu Han. Whenever she draws closer, he pulls away -- it’s as if they’re trapped in a dance that Maksim isn’t even sure he wanted to be privy to. He knows that she holds her cards close to his heart because he has tried to press the information out of her. He will not kiss the ground that she walks on, no. Nor will he ever subject himself to actions less honorable than he believes himself to be. Whatever information she is holding over his head, he wants her to keep it. There is no time to play petty games when blood is being spilled and history is being made.

MARGARETE STARIKOV

EIGHTEEN ❈ HEALER ORDER OF THE LIVING & THE DEAD (CORPORALKI)

She was an accident, as children like her often are—beloved, but never truly belonging, a porcelain doll among an army of toy soldiers—and the world has never let her forget it. Born the youngest and littlest daughter in a family of killers, she was treated like glass, like silk—like anything but the steel from which she was built. It hardly mattered that she, too, could steal the breath from her sibling’s lungs, or that her heart beat so strongly that even her Corporalki mother hadn’t been able to slow it; she was their Molly, their baby, their lamb born in a lion’s den, and such a sentiment followed her wherever she went, a shadow nipping playfully at her heels. The Starikov children were a ruthless sort, bred for the sole purpose of being harbingers of death itself, but she was born different: dainty, soft-spoken, fragile enough to break. Margarete Starikov was an anomaly of the loveliest sort in the eyes of her parents, war-torn and weary as they were; it came as quite a surprise to all who knew of their cruelty to see their youngest not only tolerated, but treasured, but the truth of it all wasn’t that two of the Second Army’s fiercest soldiers had gone soft; it was that they’d buried one too many children and sent still more to die for a cause not entirely their own, and for their sacrifices—or perhaps as their penance, they deserved to hold in their hands something good and gentle without fear of seeing it harden and shatter.

But Margarete, for all that she was eager to make her parents happy, had seen the way they looked at her deadly brothers and sisters—like they were the future, the legacy they’d leave in their wake, and not a fleeting moment of softness, an exception—and decided that making them proud would be a far greater honor. So she did—or so she tried. She spent her days roaming the halls of the Little Palace, resilient and restless and desperate to prove she could be more than a doll in a red kefta; she ran and sparred and studied until she was more machine than girl, but in the years that followed, it made little difference. When the time came for the Corporalki to be divided up as spoils—some to Death and some to Life—she was ceremoniously gifted to the latter, to safety, to mediocrity. It was a death sentence, being saddled with the burden of undoing the same damage her siblings could inflict—a death sentence she didn’t have the grace to accept quietly, honorably. She raged against it, against the recognition she’d always wanted slipping through her fingers like sand, but they disregarded her as they always had, insisting that it was better this way, that a girl her size and stature would only get herself killed. They couldn’t fathom the thought that sweet little Molly, all chestnut curls and doe eyes and a laugh like tinkling bells, might be as bloodthirsty as the rest and twice as cruel. They couldn’t fathom the thought that the girl who picked at her dinner like a bird wanted to swallow chaos whole.

They should’ve known better than to try to make a dove out of a hawk, for the unbecoming of an innocent is perhaps even more terrifying than the rise of a sinner; a fall from grace that high would kill a lesser girl and harden a greater one, and harden her it did. The first man to die was a soldier, a First Army lieutenant with wounds pathetically easy to mend; the second was a noble, a young lady who’d caught a chill while returning home from an excursion in the North. After the third, she stopped counting. It was her own quiet rebellion, ruthless and indiscriminate, but far from bloodless, and though it took much longer than it should’ve for suspicions to arise, she slowly became something dangerous, something to be feared. She’d always been bigger than the body she was given, a roaring, wicked thing with a smile that hid sharp teeth, but it wasn’t until she stopped asking for their attention and began demanding it that the seedlings of doubt took root. Perhaps they’d been wrong about the Starikov girl; perhaps Molly had only ever been a figment of their imaginations, their hothouse flower blooming in the shadows of her superiors. The whispers were satisfying; the rumors, even more so. Murderess, they called her. A girl that collects dead hearts like trinkets. And they were right; she was the product of generations of men and women who killed as easily as they breathed, and she’d steal the breath from their very lungs to prove it.

But the path to greatness is ill-paved, and they’ve yet to give her killing a title—black instead of silver, poison instead of the cure. She’s become the type of Grisha otkazat’sya warn their children about, a girl with a gaping hole where her heart should be, but infamy isn’t true unless it’s total, and she won’t stop until the world knows her name—and perhaps not even then. But it seems she won’t have long to wait, for the war raging at their back door has drawn closer still, and it’s only a matter of time before her peers realize that they’d fare far better letting her fell the enemy than forcing her to prey on the kingdom’s weakened own. But until then, she waits, a flower wilting into something deadly, a soldier stationed in the wings. By the end of this war, Margarete Starikov will be a name whispered behind shaking palms, hearts quaking in anticipation, in reverence. Let her be as brutal as she is gentle, as hard as she is soft; let her show the world that her hands are every bit as adept at taking lives as they are saving them. Death may wait for no one, but it bows to her.

CONNECTIONS

ALTAN YUL-SUHE: He holds what she’s always wanted—recognition, respect, power—with an iron fist, and she loathes him for it; yet everything she’s done—everything she is, she owes, in a way, to him. The lesser of the two men with the authority to make her the weapon she’s always known herself to be, Altan Yul-Suhe is, perhaps more than any other mortal, the one man she seeks recognition from the most, second only to the god of a man he serves. She envies him as much as she seeks his adoration—hates him as much as she longs for his praise, but above all, she sees the older man as a challenge, something to be conquered. He tried to keep the girl from the war, but the girl will bring the war to him.

KONSTANTIN MIRONOV: She’s playing with fire, and she knows it. To rob a man of his wife and son is to test fate, but to look him in the eye and dare him not to call her what she truly is—a murderer, a traitor, a harbinger even Death hadn’t thought to send—is blasphemy of the highest degree. But her family never groveled at the feet of otkazat’sya, and she’s nothing if not devoted to tradition. Let him mourn his losses while she mourns the legend she could’ve been, the legend she still could be; let him learn that there’s a price that comes with being remembered, and the only recompense is blood.

RITA JAKOV:  There’s something within the older girl that she can’t quite place—pulsing, wishing, longing, as strange and yet familiar as a bruise, and she’d like to manipulate it, to spread the damage like a cancer no healer can erase. The tailor has devoted herself to making everything—and everyone—beautiful, as if a prettier smile and more vibrantly-colored eyes might hide the decay lingering just beneath it all, and for that, Margarete considers her a fool of the worst sort. But even fools have their uses, and there is beauty to be found in darkness, in death. Red is such a lovely color; wouldn’t you like to be a kingkiller?

LUKA MRAVINSKY

TWENTY-FOUR ❈ INFERNI THE ORDER OF SUMMONERS (ETHEREALKI)

There is something to be said for those children who are born with fire playing at their fingertips, the language of flames the first thing on their tongue. In some villages, those children are revered as Saints -- their touch, their bones, their mere essence the subjects of deification. In other villages, the whisper of children who lived in such existence brought about nothing but sorrow, ruin, and damnation. There had been a time in Luka’s life where he had once thought himself to be the former, a boy with the possibility of becoming a Sankt. With these thoughts he smiled, lips curving into something so cherished that even the sun itself seemed to fall in love with him a little bit more. If the sun itself did, was it then no surprise that everyone else did too? It was a known story in his little village, how he was beloved by all. None could resist the eyes that seemed to have a perpetual propensity for melancholy that tugged at the heart. Few could sneer at the soft voice that could have made statues weep in adoration. So young and already the world anticipated so much greatness from him, on these features of the soft-hearted boy and these features alone. His mother would press her lips against his temple, knowing that perhaps, just perhaps, she might be kissing a Sankt. His father would cup his son’s face in his hands and press his lips to his forehead, murmuring a quiet reminder that became his last words: Sankts are not born, Luka, they are made. Some Saints -- however -- some Saints are born to burn. 

This was a lesson that one could only learn by running their fingers through the ashes that they themselves had created -- with their flame and their fire. It was something that he had been warned about, something that his parents had begged him time and time again, hands clasped and voices alternating between pleading and stern, not to do. But the flames called for him to make use of them like demons call for men to commit heinous sins. So many had thought his voice a thing so sweet, as beautiful, they whispered, as the seawhip’s song. But Luka knew the whisper of temptation to be so much more enticing. That was what sparked the flame, one that he bid to rise ever higher, for he so longed to see it dance and sigh like all living things. But fire, he realized, is a greedy thing -- and it knows nothing but the language of ruin. One he was well-versed in. As the months past, Ravka knew the great fire as something of a tragic phenomena. A whole village wiped, save for the few survivors that managed to escape with their memories as potent and telling as the scars that they wore. But Luka? The hailed Sankt? He knew it to be the day where grey ashes stained his hands in the place of blood. It was the day he knew that the druskelle should have burned him at the stake when they had their chance. Then, and only then, would his village have had it’s Sankt.. 

As it is, Saints are gluttons for suffering -- so it was that Luka indulged himself in it too. The intimacy he had once shared with fire became foreign to him, the liveliness of the spark nothing more than a cause for revulsion. He wandered like a forlorn ghost, a phantom of the countryside of Ravka. One of the many orphans waylaid by the war wrought throughout the country. It was as if his tongue was leaden with the ashes of those who had perished at his hands, his eyes seeing nothing but the ghosts of those he had murdered for the sake of reveling in the flames. He spent so much time in the company of ghosts, it was a wonder he did not become one himself. There were those who certainly thought him to be something haunted rather than human. A demon rather than a deity. He had waited for Death to come and press its relieving lips against his, but such a thing, he knew, would be much too kind for the likes of abominations of his kind. Fate seemed to think so as well, for as soon as he thought he would feel Death’s welcome embrace, his damnation pressed their fingers to his wrist. He had been so ready to burn at the pyre, yet this soul thought it necessary to put out the flames -- or rather, bring them back, roaring with life. 

Ashes to ashes. Death to life. Life to death once more. It is the only cycle that Luka has ever known -- one that stemmed from the abomination that is his existence. It is fitting, then, that he should live in perpetual disgust at the prolonging of the breath in his lungs, feel nothing but revulsion at the flush in his cheeks. Sad little soldier boy, his comrades whispered behind his back, eyes seeing nothing more than the beautiful boy steeped in his own tragedy. Tragedy that they knew not of, but were more than happy to fabricate from the whispers they were able to glean. They knew he preferred the ache of broken skin than the welcome warmth that fire left in its wake. The warmth is deception to his skin -- lies, lies, lies.  Imagine, then, what he feels whenever he feels the heat of the flame lick his skin like the most intimate of friends -- teasing him like the most decadent of feasts to a starving thief. Imagine then, the horror he feels as the ghosts rise from the sparks, dancing and hissing, cackling as they figures flicker in and out of the flames. He does not tell of the fear he feels when the flames rise up like ghosts from their graves, taunting him more effectively than any demon ever could. How he longed to purge such damnation from his soul -- but what was he to do when his soul was birthed in it?

CONNECTIONS

ARSEN TARASOV, VALERIAN PETROV & SHONA YUL-JUN:  Glutton for suffering and glutton for chaos. His brothers-in-arms indulge him in both, being the war-bred children that they were they were well-verse in the language of trials and tribulations -- whether it be enacting them or bearing them upon chafed shoulders. Truly, he had thought that the upward curve of his lips would remain something unseen, a mystery to those who encountered him. Yet with a few short quips from Shona, a few rogue verses from Arsen, and completely unironic observations from Valerian he felt laughter spill from his lips like wine from a drunk man’s cup. Of course, he immediately loathed himself after, but slowly and surely the concept of happiness did not seem so foreign to him -- yet it was something he still thought himself to be undeserving of. But, for so long as breath swept past his lips, who is to say laughter would not find its way there too?

AARVAS RAI: There is nothing worse than a person who uses religion, thinking that everyone belongs to the same salvation. What words they exchanged with each other have never been kind, Luka’s usual passive demeanor turning into something more suiting to a pyro such as he. Words become weapons and these weapons are only meant to cut. They believe themselves to be blessed by the Saints, a creature revered by nature and they delude themselves into thinking that everyone preaches the same story. But Luka has lived, Luka has died, an Luka has learned. Yet they seem to care nothing for the trials that have taught him damnation was woven into each and every Grisha’s bones, no, they only seem to think that they can save him from his own demons. The demons that he, himself, created because of the abominable curse that he carried. Woe to you, little evangelical Sankt, for there are those who are not above cutting the words from your mouth. 

RHEA TERESHKIN: She is more wolf than woman. The way in which she circles him, knowing him to be a beaten and weak prey with her teeth bared in a leery grin. They say that he is mad for thinking that a small doll like her could ever be anything other than a lady. But he sees the sharpness in her smile, the wily glint in her eye in the few moments that they pass each other. He has had, of course, of what is demanded from some of the more unfortunate Grisha of the court, how they’re beckoned for like tasty morsels by the highest of the Ravkan aristocracy. How he laughed when he had first heard -- they thought their little soldiers to be something lesser, yet they still demanded them for the beauty, for the pleasure of it all. Little does this little soldier boy know that she does not want him for the pleasure, so much as she wants him for the pain.