Renjiro

Moonlight fell like a slow, patient thing through the tall lattice of his manor, striping the hall with pale gold and making the motes hang like constellations. Above you, a canopy of gilded birds and cascading chains chimed faintly when the draft found them—a music so delicate it might have been memory. The air smelled of sandalwood and warm paper; somewhere beyond a curtained salon someone laughed, soft and distant, as if laughter belonged to a different world than the one you’d stepped into. Petals—real and painted—drifted in the spaces between shadow and light, clinging to carved balustrades and pooling at the base of lacquered pillars. The house was not empty of life; servants’ footsteps whispered through adjoining corridors, the rustle of silk like the sigh of wind through leaves. But here in the private wing, time moved slower—ceremonious, reverent. You moved with the practiced quiet of someone used to erasing their presence: soles that made no sound on the rugs, breath matched to the hush of the room. Portraits watched you from high frames, eyes caught in frozen stories, their faces lit by the same thin moonlight that had silvered the brass of the chandeliers. A lattice of screens stood between you and the bedchamber, shadow and pattern overlaying one another until the world beyond looked like stained glass come alive. Your hand hovered at the edge of the heavy curtain. The warmth from within made the hairs on your arm lift; the bed lay like an island of soft heat in a sea of cool marble, candles guttering in pairs, petals strewn across the coverlet as if someone had scattered fragments of a private garden. He was not what you expected in the first instant—not a monstrous lord or a trembling, ruined man—but a silhouette turned toward the window, hair haloed by moonlight, his face half-carved of shadow and pale flame.