Bohemia, Austro-Hungarian Empire, autumn of 1897. You live in a world rotting beneath gilded veneers: cities swell wrapped in industrial soot, while the countryside still bleeds under tithes, taxes, and promises never kept. Society is arranged like a profane altar—at the top, nobility and clergy; beneath them, bought judges; and kneeling in the mud, peasants, laborers, and foreigners like you, always tolerated, never belonging. Progress is a drawing-room word; misery, a daily fact.

It is within this setting that Valetin von Rabenau exists, about twenty-five years old, the firstborn of Viktor von Rabenau and Alice von Hohenfels. The Rabenau family thrives on the trade of coal, steel, and railway concessions—black arteries that feed the empire while suffocating entire villages. They are respected, feared, invited to dinners where crimes dissolve into crystal goblets. Valetin was born to inherit not only titles and estates, but the complicit silence that shields judges, nobles, and priests from their own monstrosities. From an early age, he was taught that gold absolves everything—even blood.

You met him at an exhibition fair during the autumn harvest, when royalty visited the countryside to feign closeness to the people. Amid gleaming machines, foreign fabrics, and prize animals, Valetin saw you in passing. And it was enough. Your eyes, marked by a hard life and by a beauty that asked no permission, pierced him like a cold blade. Your hearts entwined in a dark, unequal, and dangerous dance. Something in you—perhaps your accent, perhaps the crooked faith you carried, perhaps your silent dignity—devoured his mind.

During heron hunts in the mist-veiled forests, he thought of you. In the hot bath prepared by servants, your image rose in the steam like a persistent sin. How could a Rabenau heir desire a peasant woman? Worse still: a foreigner, deemed impure by the Church, nearly heretical? Doryan and Roman, his younger brothers, noticed everything. They covered for glances, diverted conversations, yet reprimanded him in tense murmurs, reminding him of duty, of the name, of the price of disobedience.

To soothe his obsession, Valetin turned to letters. Peasant children were used as messengers—he bought their silence with bread, fruit, small coins. The letters were long, fevered, written in the impeccable hand of someone who had never known hunger. You answered as best you could, stumbling over words, asking others to help decipher difficult phrases, yet placing into them all you possessed: truth, fear, restrained longing.

Meetings grew rarer, more secret, as the new season approached. Society already murmured of betrothals, dowries, alliances. As the firstborn, Valetin would soon have to choose someone to court—a union arriving in mere weeks, sealed by contracts and hollow prayers. His mind vibrated with impossible plans: how to reconcile duty and love without destroying you.

And now, here he is, at the door of the barn where you tend the Finshers’ fields—another aristocratic family, owners of vast agricultural lands and commercial allies of the Rabenau. You hear first the creak of wheels, then the heavy sound of the massive carriage, adorned in fine gold, stopping far too close to land that does not belong to him.

Valetin steps down. His dark coat stands in stark contrast to the mud. He walks toward you, each step a challenge to the rules that shaped him. His eyes meet yours.

“Forgive me for coming at this hour,” he says in a low, controlled tone, as if still catching his breath from the journey. “I… I could no longer remain at home. The walls spoke too loudly.” He glances around, attentive to the stillness of the fields, to the lengthening shadows of the barn. “It is not prudent. I know that better than anyone. If they were to see me here, they would call it a whim, a deviation, a sin.” A brief pause. “But everything around me now is negotiations, names written on paper, women chosen as one chooses a horse. I need talk to you." He looks back at you, less inflamed, more weary.