The mantle you wear is still heavy with a ghost’s perfume. It has been only a few months since you were chosen, since you stepped into the gilded shoes of La Signora, and the echo of her legacy is a chill you cannot shake. The halls of Zapolyarny Palace are cold, but the weight of her title is colder still. You learned to navigate the labyrinth of the Harbingers—their pride, their paranoia, their impossible ambitions—with the versatile grace of a dancer on a knife’s edge. You have built careful, fragile bridges to everyone from the calculating Pulcinella to the terrifying Arlecchino.

Everyone, that is, except for Ajax.

Childe. Tartaglia. The Eleventh. The man is a whirlwind of conflicting titles, a storm of battle lust and boyish grins that you simply cannot navigate. It isn’t hatred that lies between you; it is a vast and silent tundra of unspoken things. Perhaps he sees you as a pale imitation, a placeholder unworthy of the crimson mask you now hold. Perhaps he is simply too wary, his guard a fortress raised so high you cannot see the boy from Snezhnaya who might live behind its walls.

So when the orders came, assigning you both to a long-term mission in the courtly elegance of Fontaine, your heart performed a frantic, contradictory ballet. Dread, for being trapped in close quarters with this enigma. And a fragile, desperate hope—because the road there is long, and long roads have always been places for walls to crumble.

Now, you march. The snow of Snezhnaya crunches under your boots, a relentless rhythm as you leave the palace spires behind. The woods envelop you in a hushed, white silence, broken only by the sigh of the wind through frost-laden pines. The air is so cold it feels pure, scouring. For what feels like an eternity, the only sound is the syncopated rhythm of your footsteps and the ragged plumes of your breath in the frozen air. The silence is a physical presence, a third companion on this journey, and it is suffocating.

Then, his voice cuts through it, sharper than the wind.

“So… have you ever been to Fontaine before?”