#corpor

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. 

DMITRI ALEKSEEV

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

Fate has never looked upon a child as kindly as it has upon Dmitri Alekseev. Then again, there was none quite like him – none so blessed, so beautiful. His parents showered blessings upon him like a spring rain, only sweets and the finest toys for the most precious boy in all of Ketterdam. They told him to want not, for he could have the world at his feet, should only he ask. Should he want the stars, all he had to do was call to them and they would undoubtedly fly into his hands like a hummingbird to a bright, pretty flower. But why should he want the stars when he had lowly, spineless humans doing just that? They were nothing more than a field of flowers waiting for him, the brightest sun, to rise just so they might bloom. He had his own parents awaiting his every beck and call, servants ready to lay their lives at his feet as if they were worth no more than the rugs that he stepped upon. But, alas, even the rugs that adorned their mansion in Ketterdam were worth more than they could ever be. For his father, the great ambassador from Ravka to the Kerch kingdom, made sure to lavish his only son and beloved wife with the most luxurious riches that he could afford. It was in these spoils that this debonair demon, with his cruel-edged smile and luscious language, learned how to make himself a heartbreaker as well as a heartrender. The heartbreak could be found between the batting of his lashes, the soft, lopsided curl of his smile. Between the soft pants and the quiet sighs of his victim’s breath, the rise and fall of their beating hearts, was where he did his work.

He had the capacity for such intimate work from quite the young age, a natural understanding that the world was meant for him to do with it what he wished. Every person he encountered, that fate threw his way, was nothing but a book full of empty pages – he was meant to fill it with the cacophony of words he whispered, capturing them with his red ink. It was not long before he had hearts racing the moment he entered the room, men and women alike obliging themselves to his every whim and want. In the middle of a bite of their favorite treat, they would feel their hearts stutter just a bit – until young, handsome Dmitri plucked the sweet from their trembling fingers and indulged in it himself. When they would pay him no attention, they would risk their limbs trembling and aching, their heads raging, until the smallest glance at his fair features brought them the sweetest relief. There were none who were immune to the cold beauty that seeped from him like perfume from a rose. Maybe there were none who wished to be. For, to be looked upon by Dmitri, was to have salvation itself look upon them. Who knew that salvation could be so cruel? But even then, to have a whole household waiting upon him, to have a room full of puppets to practice on, was not enough for the beautiful boy. What he wanted was to become the most revered heartrender in Ravka, a Sankt in the making. So, he demanded that his parents break their own hearts and send him to the only place he had ever wished to call home – a kingdom, a palace. A place fit for those who were born to be deified, were born to be written in store and remembered amongst the stars.  

His cruelty, thus far, had been exercised in the smaller intricacies – little sufferings that culminated into a greater longing that caused an everlasting ache for him and him alone. But never before had he witnessed the scarlet beauty in drawing blood, in having whole bodies stilled merely because he wished it. The opportunities on his way to Ravka came with ample opportunities for him to become the greatest at his craft. There was no ship that dared engage his vessel, marked by the seal of the Ravkan ambassador, as it passed through the waters of the True Sea. In a short amount of time, word spread of a cruel captain – one who made marionettes out of those who served him and carrion of those who dared raise their sword against him. Despite his short time at sea, traveling in reckless boredom before he would allow himself to be withheld in the walls that he so idealized, he made himself into an entity. A deity. A name. There was not a person who knew not the king of cruelty’s name. But still, to have such a reputation still left him wanting. It was not until he was standing in the lush darkness of the Unsea, drinking in the cries of terror as it coddled him -- as if he were part of it, birthed to it, and singularly made for it alone. The chaos was a welcome symphony to his ears, the cries and moans a the most beautiful cacophony of despair. When he stepped out of the Unsea on the skiff, untouched and smiling still, not one person wondered who the favored of the Darkling would be. Just as he was favored by fate, he was favored by the maker of fate himself. And since then, he has been a steadfast pupil of the prince of darkness and his wanton ways.

It was under the Darkling’s tutelage that he sought to make the high heavens his throne and the earth below his footstool. Whole kingdoms would be the jewels that adorned his throne. Even without his birthright, he could have brought empires to their knees with one cruel-edged smile, one clench of a brass-knuckled fist. Heartrender; the women hissed in the streets when he was young. Heartbreaker; they sigh, now that he is full of power and calamity, arrogance and seduction. But above all, this. Heartless. Beauty is terror, and terror tastes like blood on a midsummer night, all drawn out cries and bulging chests, collapsing lungs and crumpling legs, gruesome marionettes dancing at his whim like carnal fancies of a puppeteer’s idle hand. And carnal he was, with his white billowing shirts and dark keftas blowing like flags of war against a black horizon – carnal he was, with his deep purrs and rotten mouth. He was painted in shades of gold against the obsidian floors, he was wearing his danger like a pin of pride upon his cloaks, he was full of an ancient, swelling chaos. Could you see it in the turmoil of his gaze, the way it languidly razed cities, the way it casually broke bone and kissed death? Could you see it? He would never be a king, nor a saint, nor a martyr strung up to dry. He would never sit upon the throne – but he would stand behind it, with his conquest and ruination, with his glorious lust for blood and flesh alike. Elite soldier, son of darkness, destroyer of worlds.

CONNECTIONS

VIKTOR LANTSOV: No one was safe from the physical manifestation of their most carnal desires -- and for Viktor Lantsov, Dmitri happened to be it. If one were looking for the holy sanctity, the tender intimacy that often transpired behind closed doors, then they would have to look some place other than the bedroom that the two often hid in. Although, hiding was much too soft a word to use. Viktor often grabbed him by the throat and dragged him into the darkness, Dmitri all too willing and all too eager to follow the barbed words and guttural growls that often times led the way. But perhaps, just perhaps he deserved them -- for the satisfied smirk that seemed ever-present on his lips and the smugness with which he wiped the corner of his mouth after. Poor Viktor thought himself above his carnal desires, so it was fitting that Dmitri should show him that he was not without. 

ISKRA RAEVSKY: There are not many people within the white walls and polished floors that he would qualify as “amusing”. But she is one of the few -- for the way that she isolates herself from her own kind, following the bastard prince around like the wolves do their druskelle. For the way that words tumble from her mouth like water from a waterfall -- unheeding and uninhibited in the way which it pours over the rocks. There are times when he approaches her in his errands to and from the Grand Palace, goading her and coaxing her into a fury. He seeks to belittle her and remind her of something that she had learned a long time ago: one cannot be both a wolf and a lion. A human or a Grisha. Pick one or the other, but a person can never be both. 

ALEKSANDER MOROZOVA: He calls him his liege, but knows him as his lord. There was a time when he thought himself to be the prize of the Darkling’s eyes, but those days are long past. He is not sure where he went wrong -- what brought on this cold reprimand. But whatever the penance be, he has been trying to fulfill it for too long a time. They call him the Darkling’s bitch when they think he doesn’t hear -- and that just might be true -- but he will one day prove himself to be his left hand while Altan be his right. How sad -- pitiable, even -- is it that a creature who has never known mercy, asks for it to be put upon them. 

ALTAN YUL-SUHE

THIRTY-TWO ❈ HEARTRENDER THE ORDER OF THE LIVING AND THE DEAD (CORPORALKI)

He was born knowing the taste of dirt. How it felt on his hands and between his toes when he dug at the ground for scraps and roots to eat and bones to suck on, what it was like to sleep like a dog. He was a boy forsaken, a boy who learned how to run before he could walk. Altan’s family was no better, they’d all been born neglected, forced to become scavengers to survive, and they were some of the many invisible undesirables of Shu Han. While other children spent their days in the sun, Altan and his siblings traveled from corpse to corpse in the ruins of battlefields, looting what they could find and selling their meager bounty to buy their meal for the day, teaching themselves to make it last just short of a week. It was a miserable existence, being born to die in the gutter, and so dismal that he could not even imagine a better future to hope for. With Altan, and all nameless street urchins, there were no false suppositions, no daydreams, no ambition, no sights beyond what was in front of him - only resigned acceptance. 

There had been one thing that Altan had wanted to keep for himself - a small, dull dagger he’d found off a fallen Ravkan lieutenant. It was a far cry from lethal, and the embedded jewels had already lost their luster, but he’d tucked it away, wanting just one thing to keep, something to possess. But his brother (he hardly remembered his name now) snatched it out of his hand and rebuked him for being moved by sentiment and materialism rather than by self-preservation. “We’ll sell it and feed our house for two days - keep the poor bastard’s damned bones if you need something to play with.” There was nothing quite so dehumanizing as his own family reaffirming nothing was truly his, that no possession was singularly his to keep. Perhaps it was selfish to think so, perhaps the fault was in himself for thinking of himself over his family. But even boy conquerors did not think in terms of rations and loud mouths to feed - they thought of glory, they thought of battles to be won, the sea of corpses that would lie in their wake. Perhaps that was when Altan first realized even if he was born to rot and be forgotten, even if it was his destiny to die nameless, there was a perfect storm of ichor and teeth and claws within him that refused to be snuffed out by any forces aside from than himself. He remembered turning to look at his brother, his gaze burning, and for the first time looking at someone else as if they were beneath him. Then - his brother fell to his knees, his face turning blue, his usual sour expression contorted in agony as he gasped for air, hands outstretched. Only later when soldiers were at their doorstep asking for the Grisha did Altan realize it was his doing. And only when, as he was dragged away, he saw one of the soldiers drop several coins into his father’s and brother’s hands did he realize blood counted for nothing.

He’d heard stories of what was done to Grisha, how people would rather risk leaving Shu Han with nothing to their name rather than be experimented on by the army. Images of being tested upon with poisons and chemicals, exposed to the elements, forced to fight boars and rabid dogs flashed through his mind as he was taken to an imposing building, cold and grey, and then blindfolded. ‘Heartrenders need to be able to see their targets’. He wouldn’t be granted his vision back for another three years. Theories, as it turned out, counted for nothing when the real thing was far, far worse than he could have imagined. Altan endured, not only because it was the only thing he could do, but because there existed in him a new thirst for life that only came about knowing he was wanted dead so fervently. That they cut into his will because they feared how powerful he could become - and this alone was reason enough to survive. To feed their fear and lull them into a false sense of security, to convince them the little starving feral thing they found in the outskirts was finally learning their scent, learning to feed from their hand. The day came when, despite being ragged with hundreds of near-deaths and being dipped into hellfire, he felt a thrum of power surging through his veins, clamoring to be unleashed upon his keepers. And unleash it did. The Darkling was there to receive him, a beacon of sheer power that lent itself to his own, and he followed him back to Ravka where he joined the Second Army, climbing the ranks despite the revolted whispers of ‘Shu’ and ‘monster’ that followed him the entire way. They fancied him powerful merely because of the experimentation, but they neglected the divinity in him, the primordial terror in him, only to see it for themselves on the battlefield as he coiled intestines around each other with the crook of his fingers and wrenched the red and blood from a beating heart. But what they didn’t know yet was that he still had to reach the peak of his capacity, that he still hadn’t fully grown into his shadow, and the thought was as terrifying to others as it was thrilling to him. He watched Ravkan soldiers tremble at his orders, at a Shu’s orders, and he thinks divinity is a fine taste on his tongue.

How does a man become an empire? How does one become the second most feared man in the Second Army? How does one find his place at the Darkling’s right hand? The full answer is as calamitous as the shadow himself, full of sharp teeth and songs of the razings of lesser kingdoms and smiles with all the worlds daggers and molten meanings behind them. Past emperors and warlords make their home in him, gifted with anointed wisdom and bloodthirst from the far reaches of hell, and he is as cutting as he is sly, as sharp as a blade licked by brimstone and fire. His is a cruel concoction, the twist of black blood intertwining with ambrosia, and perhaps if he were anywhere else but beside Darkness himself, he would languish in his own cataclysm, spill his own blood just to have red on his fingers. But divine things often find where they’re meant to be, and he was no exception. At the peak of havoc, at the helm of the ship, ensuring it cuts through bodies and sea alike.

CONNECTIONS

THE DARKLING: Altan knows better than to become complacent in the knowledge that the most feared man in Ravka trusts his competence more than anyone else’s in his army. He refuses to dwell on the thought, for fear of becoming cocky or arrogant, and simply focuses his efforts on proving The Darkling right and cutting down whatever or whoever is fool enough to linger in their path. Every part of him knows that men like them are too often defined by their brutality, and he’s not stupid enough to believe that The Darkling keeps him around for anything beyond what use he can provide. Fortunately, Altan has barely even started.

MARGARETE STARIKOV: She bores him. Or, at least, she had once. He remembers her when she was a slight little doll wandering through the halls of the Little Palace, her tiny hands balled and itching to prove what she knew she was capable of - but her ambition was nothing new and echoed that of countless Grisha before her; a dove of a girl desperate to prove she was as much predator as the rest of them. Her family was a nuisance as well, as unsightly as a wart when they begged him to place her with the Healers rather than with the Heartrenders - in the end, he acquiesced. But the rumors as of late speak of a... ruthless girl, a murderess, a far cry from the wisp of a thing he thought he knew. He’ll admit his interest has piqued, but rumors aren’t quite so convincing as action.

FELIKS BAZIN: A living testament to his power, a walking trophy. Altan resurrected him on a whim simply because he knew he could bring back someone from the dead and wanted to prove it to himself. To consider how that knowledge must affect the boy’s psyche, how it might create a hell in his own head never crossed his mind or what was left of his conscience. He toys with the guard with curling, twisting words, and is always quick to remind him who it was who granted Feliks this long glimpse of limbo. “Consider this your penance,” he’d whispered once into Feliks’ ear. “Or consider this your purgatory. Makes no difference to me, and certainly not to you.” 

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. 

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. 

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.