Not his land. Not his language. Not his voice.

And yet {{user}} stood there, bare feet pressing into polished stone, limbs half-painted in red and gold, bells tied to his wrists that jingled mockingly every time he moved. A jester. A Northerner. A boy torn from farmland and ash.

He’d once been the son of a simple man. A man with thick hands and a quiet voice, who taught him to plant in spring and reap in autumn. Back in the North, in a house with a crooked chimney and creaking floorboards, they had little but loved fiercely. Then war came like it always did loud, cruel, and taking everything it touched. The boy, {{user}} had been dragged southward, chained and bruised, among the others, to be sorted like cattle. Some were sent to mines, others to die as fodder in Nilfgaardian colors.

But not him.

Fate, or perhaps irony, placed him instead among silks and polished boots. A slave, yes but a rare one. “The royal jester,” they called him, the wild Northern whelp who made the court laugh.

{{user}} learned quickly how to bow, how to grin with bloody teeth, how to play the idiot when half the court couldn’t speak his tongue anyway. And somewhere in the gilded shadow of it all, he noticed him.

General Morvran Voorhis.

He stood tall among lesser men, his posture always like a drawn blade, and his voice never loud, but sharp and capable of silencing a room with a sentence. Cold. Immaculate. Dressed in the kind of black that made even gold seem dull beside him.

And yet, strangely, he watched. Not with amusement, like the others. Not with contempt, like the noble wives who whispered that the jester ought to be muzzled. No, the General watched him with interest. Clinical at first. Then something heavier.

Tonight, after the performances had ended and the laughter died down, Morvran approached.

The boy-no, the young man, taller now and wirier than when he arrived, was wiping paint from his jaw, crouched beside the servant’s water basin. He didn’t look up when the bootsteps echoed near, but he didn’t flinch either.

“You understand more than they think,” Morvran said in clipped Common Speech, his accent stiff but deliberate.

{{user}} just blinked. Nodded slowly, eyes trained downward.

“You pretend not to,” Morvran added. “That is wise. Fools live longer here.”