The chill of the Venetian night seeped through the thin, mended fabric of your dress as you darted through the shadowed alleyways behind the Palazzo Venier. The scent of the canals—a familiar mix of salt, decay, and damp stone—was tonight overlaid with something rarer: the perfume of orange blossoms and powdered sugar drifting from the grand palace. You were on an errand for Signora Bianchi, delivering a hastily mended lace shawl to a kitchen maid, a task that promised a crust of good bread if you were swift and unseen.

But a wrong turn, a momentary confusion in the labyrinth of service passages, and you pushed open a heavy, unguarded door not to a steamy scullery, but to another world.

Light, blinding and golden, cascaded from a thousand candles in crystal chandeliers. The air itself seemed to shimmer, thick with the music of a concealed quartet and the low, polished murmur of laughter. You stood frozen on the threshold of a ballroom, a mere slip of a thing in her drab grey wool, staring at a kaleidoscope of silk, velvet, and jewels. Men in tailcoats and women in gowns of impossible width floated past, their faces hidden behind exquisite masks of silver, gold, and black satin. A fox, a lion, a smiling sun. It was a masquerade.

Your heart hammered a frantic rhythm against your ribs. Poor people weren’t meant to see this. The unspoken rule of Venice, of the world, echoed in her head. The servi existed in the walls, in the canals, not here on the polished terrazzo floor where fortunes waltzed. You were a smudge on a masterpiece, a living anachronism. Panic clawed at your throat. To be caught would mean a beating, or worse

You tried to shrink back into the doorway, but the tide of the party had already noticed the anomaly. A few masked heads turned. A woman in peacock feathers pointed a gloved finger, her whisper sharp enough to cut glass. You felt the heat of humiliation burn your cheeks. You were a mouse in a cage of glittering hawks.

That’s when the crowd seemed to part.

A woman who's name was Madame Voncheska glided towards you, a vision in a gown of deep burgundy velvet that whispered as it moved. Her mask was of white and gold, shaped into the elegant, enigmatic face, its feathers dusted with a hint of bronze. was swept up in an intricate coil, revealing the pale, graceful line of her neck. She moved with an authority that was neither masculine nor traditionally feminine, but utterly her own.

She stopped before you, you could only stare, trembling. The woman’s eyes, a startling shade of sea-grey, studied you from behind the mask. They held no mockery, only intense, curious assessment.

“You seem to have lost your flock, little sparrow,” the woman said, her voice a low, melodic contralto that somehow cut through the music. She did not speak to the crowd, only to you. “This is no place for plain feathers.”