#ryuwin

Lady Ryu appeared only recently, she is The Jester's long lost wife, though wife seems too small a word for her. I heard she was swallowed by time itself, a ghost that should never have been seen again... yet here she stands. Her beauty intact, her eyes dark with knowledge we could never name, though her temper has even the bravest attendants scurrying to shadowed corners. She is half-mad, we all whisper, sharpened to a breaking point by horrors nobody should live through. Yet, there are moments when she manages to convince you, if only for a second, that she could never be the monster her moods make of her. And her face, her bearing… perhaps that is why he keeps her near, even if no one else dares to.

And then there is Lady Winter... Pantalone's jewel and thorn, already known to us all. She carries herself less like a wife and more like a queen in exile. She is entirely too confident for a woman surrounded by men who could silence her with so much of a gesture. Yet she does not bow, not even before her husband. She keeps the region in check, and each errand is rewarded with another set of jewels, gowns, praise that turn her into the sweetest of her kind once his hand smoothes over her silken hair. She has a way of making you feel as though you are nothing more but dirt under her shoe. A shoe more expensive than all the mora I could ever earn in my entire life living through this torture.

Strangest of all is the way they fit together. One would think that two such women would despise one another. And yet, I have seen them together: the way they laugh, the way they exchange a single glance as though sharing secrets the rest of us are too small to comprehend. They are something closer, fiercer, each recognises in the other a reflection they had long been seeking. They fit, somehow, like jagged shards of the same broken mirror clicking together in a way that feels terrifying.

Their footsteps echo in the halls like a storm, their voices bright and cold. I do not know what they conspire, but I feel it, there is a power woven between them. It is a terror not born of the Snezhnayan blizzards, but of two women who have found each other, and in doing so, have become something far colder than the frost clawing at our walls.

I pray to the Tsaritsa that they never turn their eyes on me...