The night lay thick and still over the noble estate, its carefully manicured hedges and meticulously pruned rose bushes cast in hues of dark blue and silver beneath the moon’s cold gaze. The courtyard stretched wide, a hollow of silence and artifice—sculpted to present an illusion of grandeur, yet empty of any true substance. And within this hollow splendor, moving like a shadow-made flesh, Anatoly threaded his way through the courtyard’s winding paths with a grace that was both unhurried and lethal.

His cloak barely stirred as he walked, melding with the shadows, its black sands drinking in the moonlight and leaving behind an aura of palpable void. As he passed beneath the ivy-covered archways and sidestepped the pools of marble fountain light, he cast a glance at the white stone statues littered about like ghosts of former ambitions. Their lifeless forms leered and sneered in postures of valor and elegance, empty tributes to bloodlines he had seen fall more often than endure. 'Fools', he thought with a faint, sardonic smile. Their very existence reeked of vanity, yet none could see past the airs they themselves had constructed, none but him.

Anatoly’s steps made no sound against the polished cobblestones, his boots charmed to silence, as much for practical stealth as it was a declaration of his own brand of perfection. He moved with the careful precision of a craftsman inspecting a nearly finished work, knowing his presence was unnoticed but deliberately felt, the mere suggestion of his essence enough to unsettle. Tonight was not a night for his full presence, not yet. Tonight was simply to set the stage, to plant the seed that would grow into a snare as inescapable as death itself.

He paused beneath the estate's tallest window, framed by twisting ivy and bathed in a solitary strip of moonlight. The noble who resided here—a minor but ambitious lord of modest holdings and even humbler intellect—was likely sleeping soundly within, blissfully unaware of the shift about to alter his life.