0. Prologue

1902, Montrau.

Ten-year-old Alisa Ludendorff drew the seventh X on the calendar sitting on her desk.

Seven X’s. Seven days. As of today, a week had passed since her mother disappeared.

Calling it a disappearance might not be the most accurate way to put it. Her mother hadn’t gone missing — she had walked out of the house on her own.

Alisa pushed the calendar aside and shifted her gaze to the radio on her desk. She plugged in the earphones and flipped the switch. The vacuum tube hummed, and heat rose from the body of the set.

Crackle, hisss. Grating static poured through the earphones.

—Today, I, reporting……

A voice reached her in broken fragments. Alisa waited for the noise to clear, but even the few words she’d managed to catch were soon swallowed by static.

“Haah……”

She noticed her palm was damp from gripping the earphones and let out a small sigh. The air was so thick with humidity that her skin felt sticky even sitting still. Metal always acted up on days like this.

She stared out at the overcast sky, heavy with the threat of rain, and absently fiddled with the radio again.

“Mum……”

Had her mother really run away because she couldn’t stand being poor? Like everyone said, had she grabbed the jewelry and fled before things got any worse, unable to bear the thought of living in squalor?

Alisa pressed her forehead against the desk and thought of her mother.

Her mother was a woman of few words, unremarkable in appearance. She might have been considered quite pretty in the rural village where she was born, but she wasn’t the kind of beauty that made strangers stop and turn in the street.

Yet the moment she stepped onto a stage, she became someone else entirely.

The lead actress of the Royal Globe, the theatre company under the patronage of the Westroben imperial family. A queen of the stage who had never once lost the starring role in the ten years since her debut.

On stage, her mother was a pitiful maid and a legendary seductress, a begging pauper and a princess of noble birth. The Queen of Westroben favored her so fiercely that she brought her along on every summer holiday — that alone said everything.

The star of Westroben. The greatest actress of her time, without question.

At the height of her career, her mother announced her retirement alongside her marriage.

The man she married was Edward Ludendorff.

The Ludendorff family was based in the port city of Montrau, one of the old, established households that had built its fortune through trade. Edward was the eldest son, set to inherit all of the family’s business and assets.

It might not have been the most brilliant match, but no one thought it a bad one. That was, until the Ludendorff trading vessel sank on the very day of the wedding.

Even so, the Ludendorffs didn’t collapse overnight. Edward was a man of responsibility, and he gave everything he had to rebuild the family. But his efforts, regrettably, bore no fruit.

Alisa still remembered that day.

It was Christmas Eve, one of the rare nights in Westroben when snow fell in thick, heavy flakes. The servants had brought in a fir tree and set it before the fireplace, and Alisa hung colorful ornaments on its branches alongside her mother.

‘Time for bed, Alisa.’

Her mother had said.

‘Saint Nicholas won’t bring gifts to children who stay up late.’

Her father added a word of his own.

Alisa nodded obediently and took her nanny’s hand up to her room. She had no intention of actually going to sleep, of course. She had a wish she wanted to ask Saint Nicholas in person.

She lay awake, holding out, then crept out of her room. She moved through the dark hallway and tiptoed down the landing.

That was when a cool draft swept beneath her nightgown. Someone was standing outside the front door, which had been flung open.

Convinced it was Saint Nicholas paying a visit, Alisa hid behind the stair railing and peeked out. But the visitor’s face was blocked entirely by her father’s frame.

‘……not going to work……!’

‘It’s over…… bankruptcy…….’

‘No cash I can pull together right now…….’

The voices grew louder and louder, until her father finally erupted in a fury of shouting and curses.

Startled, Alisa forgot she was hiding and burst into tears right where she stood. The sound jolted her father, and he rushed over, telling her it was nothing, soothing her. He fumbled through an excuse — he was sorry for raising his voice, he said, they were just playing a game. 

Even wrapped in her father’s arms as he patted her back, Alisa couldn’t stop crying. She must have sensed, somewhere deep down, that it was a lie.

The first change was that the number of maids shrank. The second was that her nanny quit without warning. The third was that the silver tableware began to disappear.

She learned later that around that time, the shipping routes to Kandor and Saravia in the east had been cut off. The imports of fine spices and textiles — the Ludendorffs’ primary trade goods — had come to a halt, and the network of trade connections built across generations crumbled in an instant.

Her mother had even stepped in, pouring a vast personal fortune into the family’s business. But that money, too, came back as nothing but debt.

What swallowed them was a vast swamp. A mire of fate and change that no single family had the strength to escape — one that pulled them deeper the harder they struggled.

The world had begun to shift. A war no one could trace back to its first spark spread without end, and the world that had once openly called itself one was shattered into pieces. Trade grew harder by the day, and restrictions on imports of anything outside military goods tightened without pause.

The Ludendorffs were a sandcastle before the tide. No matter how carefully they built, wave after wave came crashing down in a different shape each time, and they crumbled, and crumbled again.

Alisa’s parents spent three years like that, wasting away on the shore. And Alisa turned ten.

Clink, click. From downstairs came the sound of a key turning in the front door. Her father, who had gone out to look for her mother himself, was coming home.

Alisa jumped up, grabbed the radio, and burrowed into bed. She rolled onto her side, hugged the radio to her chest, and pulled the blanket over her head. She had just wrapped her arms around her knees when the door eased open.

“……Alisa, are you asleep?”

Her father’s voice.

Hoarse and cracked.

Alisa could barely remember what his voice used to sound like anymore. He spent every day outside calling for her mother, and it had left him with a permanent rasp.

That worn-out voice always made him sound like a stranger. Like someone frightening. Alisa squeezed her eyes shut and pretended to sleep.

The footsteps that had lingered in the doorway stopped right beside the bed. She felt the blanket, which had been pulled up over her head, drawn down to just below her chin — but she kept her eyes shut.

“You’re asleep.”

A large hand came to rest lightly on her head. It stroked her hair twice, then slowly lifted away.

Hands smoothing out the tangled blanket. A gaze settling on her cheek.

Alisa felt all of it and kept her eyes stubbornly closed.

“Sleep well, my little princess. You don’t need to worry about anything. Dad will always be right here. Everything’s going to be all right. It will, it……”

The footsteps faded. The bedroom door closed. The moment Alisa was sure he was gone, she yanked the blanket back over herself and pressed the earphones into her ears.

She knew what her father was about to do.

“Roxia, why did you leave? I said I could fix it, I……”

Crying. From her mother’s room, right next door.

The radio still wasn’t working properly. Alisa threw the earphones aside and pressed both hands over her ears.

A crack of weeping out of a clear sky.

Alisa clutched at the front of her nightgown, her chest too tight to bear. She yanked the collar down, stretching the neckline out of shape, but the tightness wouldn’t go away.

“Ugh……”

She finally climbed out of bed and went to the window. The moment she pushed it open, cold droplets spattered across both cheeks. Autumn rain was falling.