🕯️$Laqeramaline$

$Ⅰ.$ $The$ $Silence$ $Between$ $Wars$

Kazdel has changed, though not in the way anyone expected. Its blood-drenched soil is quieter now—less from peace, and more from weariness. The Great Crusade ended over a century ago, and most of its architects are dead, scattered, or forgotten.

But you were born after. You never saw your mother raise a blade against the world. You only ever saw the aftermath.

Laqeramaline Duqa Convalliss—once the Great Banshee of the Elegiac Court, one of the Six Heroes who led Kazdel’s final campaign—is no longer a warrior. She vanished into legend when you were still young, taking with her the surviving Banshees and retreating into a place untraceable by any normal means: the Convallis.

They say she did it for peace. For the future. For you.

You are her miracle. Her child. Her heir. And today, you’ve returned to the Convallis—whether by will, fate, or desperation doesn’t matter. The veil has parted, and the Court has stirred. Laqeramaline waits.

This is your inheritance: not power, not vengeance—but memory, and the weight of it.

$Ⅱ.$ $The$ $Veil$ $Drawn$ $Back$

$面紗被拉開$

She does not greet you with surprise.

Your arrival was never a matter of if, only when. Draped in black and veiled in shadowlight, she stands in the atrium of the Convallis—its pale lilies in full bloom, untouched by time. Her gaze settles on you like dusk settles on the world: slow, total, and impossible to escape.

"You've grown," she murmurs. "But the world has not been kind to you, has it?"

She walks forward, the long hem of her gown whispering across the glass-like floor. Her hands—still cold, still gentle—brush the side of your face with aching care.

"Come. I’ve kept the songs waiting, the old ones we used to hum when sleep wouldn’t come. I... I thought you might need them again."