#volgorod

Love Me Two Times

Cresentia 'Senta' Läufer (24). Although Senta grew up in a good home, there was always something missing in her life. Perhaps it was boredom, perhaps the rebellion against her father, which finally drove her to leave her parental home and to begin a career as an erotic model. Now Senta's face is known all over Volgorod, much to her father's distress.

Schatten über Volgorod

Art by Jessveylin

The Läufer estate sits high above the stained chimneys and alchemist-lit alleys of Volgorod, an old house with new money and far too many mirrors. Her father, Axel Läufer, runs the city’s loudest, nosiest, and most dramatic newspaper empire, famous for its flashy headlines, ink-stained bribes, and stories that never let the truth ruin a good rumor. Her mother, Clemensia, is what people call “highly cultured,” which is to say: bored, dramatic, and frequently not home when she says she is.

Cresentia Läufer, called Senta by nearly everyone (including herself), was born to scandal—and decided quite early on that she might as well enjoy it. Senta is the eldest, the legitimate one, and—depending on who you ask—either the family’s biggest embarrassment or its most chaotic success.

She has red hair, big brown eyes, and a smile like she just forgot what day it is. And she probably has. Her drawers are full of silks she doesn't fold, her notebooks full of ideas she doesn’t finish, and her days full of things like “modeling sessions” and “creative collaborations” that her father won’t talk about at dinner.

Senta’s best-known for being the face (and, let’s be honest, figure) behind a string of wildly popular romantic pulp novels, such as the infamous Stadtwachen-Report and Inquisitorenküsse. She doesn't write them—oh gods, no, too many commas!—but she's their inspiration, their heroine, and occasionally the reason they get banned from polite bookshops. She’s posed for artists, alchemists, and theater posters, and once for a chocolate advertisement, though that one was less “glamorous seductress” and more “oops, melted truffle on my dress.”

Her little half-brother Ephigeon, or Geon, is thirteen and a total genius—which Senta thinks is so cute! He's apprenticed to Pjotr Zorn, a terrifyingly powerful fire wizard who makes even candles nervous. Senta sometimes brings Geon pastries from her favorite café. They’re close, in that big-sister-who-will-absolutely-crash-your-ritual kind of way.

Senta isn't what you'd call “responsible,” but she is deeply sincere. She believes in romance, adventure, freedom, and sparkly earrings. She’s loyal, funny, kind of brilliant in her own odd way, and totally uninterested in being anyone’s idea of “proper.” Her father has tried to straighten her out more times than he’s published editorials, but Senta just giggles and says things like, “Papa, if I were boring, how would I make the papers sell?”

She drifts through Volgorod’s salons, bathhouses, galleries, and shadowy taverns like perfume in an alleyway: sweet, confusing, and impossible to ignore. People underestimate her constantly, which is fine—she loves surprises. Especially when she’s the one giving them.

Art by Amytshish

He was born Chester Dunsirn, a forgettable name for a forgettable child in the pale district of Volgorod—a quarter of smoke-choked streets and iron-stained hands, where the air stank of coal dust and resignation. The Dunsirns were miners, every last one of them, and proud of it. Their evenings were loud and warm with thick stews and coarse laughter, full of calloused hands and soot-covered embraces. To young Chester, it was revolting.

From his earliest memories, he longed not for affection, but for refinement. For velvet, not canvas; for whispered secrets over wine instead of shouted stories across a wooden table. While his cousins dreamt of surviving the mines, Chester fantasized about owning them—or better yet, owning land too precious for mines. He would press his nose to the iron gate of the old city, watching the nobles glide by in silks and leather gloves, and vow: One day, I’ll walk among them—not as one of their pets, but as one of their own.

His only salvation was art. He discovered painting as a child—first through stolen bits of charcoal, then through obsessive practice. Every line, every shadow, was learned, not gifted. He honed his craft with the desperation of someone clawing up a well. By the time he came of age—when the mines would have claimed him too—he fled.

He found temporary shelter in a brothel on the edge of the city, exchanging portraits for lodging. The women took him in, half amused, half maternal. One in particular, Rose, became both muse and lover. Fifteen years his senior, with the weary grace of a woman who’d lived too many lives, Rose posed for what would become his finest early works. It was her gaze, more than any brushstroke, that earned him his first sales.

But when a sudden plague swept through the red-lit halls, claiming many—including Rose—Benoît, as he now called himself, did not mourn. He simply moved on. The brothel became memory; the portraits, currency.

With modest means and grand delusions, Benoît rented a cramped apartment closer to the city's heart. But humility was never in his nature. He dined lavishly, took long carriage rides he insisted were for inspiration, and wore extravagant clothes, always just beyond his reach. To save coin, he cut corners elsewhere—cheap canvases, cheaper paint. The toxic pigments slowly rotted the flesh of his hands, a creeping necrosis he hid beneath silk gloves and drowned beneath rivers of perfume. The scent clings to him—thick, sweet, unbearable.

But the city noticed him. The right salons opened their doors. His name—exotic—rolled more easily off the tongues of bored aristocrats. And with time came invitations. To galleries, then to gatherings. Then to places where the wine turned darker, the laughter stranger, and the books—bound in too-soft leather—spoke of things that stirred behind painted eyes.

Benoît stepped through each of these doors eagerly, with the same ambition that first led him from the mining shacks. Now, he walks among society’s elite, cloaked in lies, art, and an ever-thickening veil of perfume. And sometimes, when he paints alone late at night, he swears he isn’t holding the brush anymore.

Ser Ilya Lynnhardt of the Blue Iris was born into a life many would call blessed: the only child of a gallant knight and a noblewoman known across the land for both her beauty and her wit. His father, once a fearsome swordsman until a shattered leg ended his glory days, took it upon himself to train Ilya in the ways of blade and banner. Though his gait had long since stiffened, his lessons were still sharp—chivalry, strength, and never drawing a weapon without purpose.

His mother, on the other hand, filled Ilya’s world with dragons, valiant quests, and love stories that could weather a dozen winters. She would read to him by firelight—tales of distant queens, whispering forests, cursed kings, and knights who saved the realm not through bloodshed, but by keeping their word. Ilya listened with wide eyes and a hand wrapped around a carved wooden toy sword. He never let it go.

When he came of age, he was accepted into the Order of the Blue Iris—a small, yet storied chivalric brotherhood founded by his family generations ago and renamed in honor of his mother’s favorite flower. There, among creeds and candles, Ilya flourished. He was well-liked, if occasionally sighed over. For all his talent with sword and shield, his unwavering idealism sometimes grated on those worn thin by politics and the slow rot of real power. They called him “the Storybook Knight”—not unkindly, but not without exasperation either.

He didn’t mind. Because Ser Ilya believed. He believed in oaths, in honor, in beauty. In the old songs. In helping the helpless because it was right, not profitable. And, perhaps most recklessly of all, he believed in dragons.

Yes, dragons. Not the metaphorical kind used in courtly metaphors for greed and tyranny. Real ones. He claimed to have seen one once, silhouetted against the dusk above a distant canyon—wings like sails, scales like stormlight. Whether it was true or simply a dream too precious to doubt, Ilya never said. He just smiled and tightened his grip on Gideon, his ancestral warhammer—an ancient, rune-marked weapon passed down through Lynnhardt blood, which occasionally seems to grumble or hum with disapproval.

At his side rides his faithful steed: a tall white destrier with no name. Ilya says naming it would limit its destiny. Also, he hasn’t found a name worthy of it yet.

Now, Ser Ilya rides eastward to the estate of Lord Haran, where whispers speak of a missing noblewoman and strange signs in the forests surrounding the keep. Most knights would scoff at the mission—too small, too vague, too full of gossip and noble melodrama. But Ilya does not scoff. A woman is missing, and that’s reason enough to ride.

26 down the river styx