Elvira Roland heard the news before breakfast.
As for who Elvira was: the fiancée who had broken off the engagement with Elaine, naturally.
She was sitting at her dressing mirror while a maid arranged the silver rose earrings she was to wear to the charity banquet. The earring had only just touched her earlobe, the metal cold enough to make her frown a little, when hurried footsteps came from beyond the door.
The woman in the mirror was halfway made up, her long golden-brown hair gathered behind her shoulders, the last wash of pale pink not yet applied to the outer corners of her eyes. She was going to the capital's charity banquet today. House Roland had spent half a month preparing for it, and her mother had made a point of reminding her: the letter of annulment had gone out yesterday, so whoever she happened to meet today, she was not to behave as though any tie to House White remained.
When her personal maid came in her face was pale, and she had even forgotten to curtsy first.
Elvira looked at her in the mirror.
"What is it?"
Only then did the maid lower her head.
"My lady. Something has happened at the White house."
Elvira's fingers stopped beside the earring. It was only yesterday that she had sent the letter to the White manor.
The annulment had not been an impulse. House White had been finished for a long time, and House Roland could not go on sinking alongside a ruined collectors' family.
A noble of the capital put the family's interests and her own interests first in all things. Refined egoism, absolutely.
She knew she had acted rationally, and she thought herself clever for it. That person, already blurring in her memory, was a diversion before a ball to her, or simply a piece of gossip.
"What happened?"
"Last night there was an explosion under the White manor. Half the old district heard it."
The room went quiet for a beat, and Elvira finally turned around.
"And Elaine?"
"They... they haven't found him."
As the words landed, a carriage went past outside, wheels grinding over the rain-slick stone, the sound dull enough that it seemed something was being crushed.
Elvira said nothing. She remembered Elaine as a child.
He used to wear a little black dress coat, led into the hall by the old butler with a very serious bodyguard at his side.
Paler than other children his age, but he stood perfectly straight. The adults all said he was the prettiest little young master House White had, and that one day he might even become a Seal-Bearer of the Scribe Codex.
If everything had gone smoothly, the boy called Elaine would have become her husband.
But in the end... at least Elvira had left Elaine his dignity.
Only... if Elaine was dead, then House White could fairly be called extinguished.
Every time another member of House White died, the story in noble society changed.
At first it was backlash from a Sealed Object. Then it was the reckoning after failed investments. Later still, some rumours simply said House White had been cursed.
Elvira had never believed it. Noble society loved the word "curse". Let one family have a run of bad luck and the whole noble class of Castibury would start reaching for transcendent studies to explain it.
Ordinary people, meanwhile, would work a run of bizarre events into a ghost story.
Then again, it made sense. What noble hadn't brushed up against powers that ran past natural law?
Without that, it was hard to hold a place in the capital.
And now Elaine had gone missing too. To Elvira there was no difference between missing and dead. Perhaps this really was the White family "curse" after all.
The members of House White had died one after another, down to the last of them, who had vanished in an explosion beneath the ancestral manor on the very night the letter of annulment arrived.
It was too much like a premeditated horror story. In a few years some third-rate writer would probably work it up into a short story, or an opera.
Elvira slowly took the earring off and set it back on the table.
"Have they found a body?"
Her maid shook her head.
"No. The cellar collapsed badly and it's chaos down there. Nobody has any idea what actually happened inside."
No body. In noble society, those two words turned into a story more easily than a body ever would.
Barring surprises, she would be hearing gossip about House White at the charity banquet before the evening was out.
If Elaine had any value left to her, it was probably as after-dinner conversation, plus a quantity of White "legacy" that could fairly be called dead weight.
She had once been House White's betrothed, after all, which naturally gave her the leading position in that particular gossip.
That house would likely become Castibury's newest capital legend for frightening children. Before that, though, a good many fearless thugs and layabouts styling themselves "capital explorers" would be slipping into the White manor to hunt for anything worth money.
As for the truth, nobody would care. People only cared about what they wanted to know and believed what they already believed. The young master the old house had swallowed, as their mouths would have it, was at that moment lying beside an old drainage channel on the south side of Castibury with half his body sunk in rainwater and silt.
When Elaine woke, the first thing he felt was cold everywhere, his body trapped as though inside an icebox... no, wait. This world didn't have iceboxes.
This was a world resembling the end of the Western Middle Ages. Something like an icebox probably wouldn't turn up for another century or two.
Think of a comparison better suited to this world, then... mm... More like being stuffed whole into a damp iron crate. Rainwater ran off the ends of his hair and down inside his collar, gravel dug into his back, and every breath pulled his chest tight with pain. He wanted to cough, but the moment he put any force behind it a taste of ash rose in his throat and choked him until his vision went black.
He had forgotten exactly what happened. All he remembered of the last second before he lost consciousness was a searing white blank.
He woke, and there was only this.
An old drainage channel, rain and mud. Could it possibly get worse than this?
He was wrapped in a black coat torn past recognition, the coat he had been wearing last night.
Except now the coat was far too big. The collar had slipped loose down below his shoulders and the sleeves swallowed his fingers, like a child caught wearing an adult's clothes. Elaine raised a hand, slowly, and saw a hand he did not know.
The fingers were much thinner, the knuckles a size smaller. The palm had been cut open on the gravel, and blood mixed with muddy water was running down between the fingers.
He stared at that hand for a long time.
Until a soaked strand of long silver-white hair slid off his shoulder and lay against the back of it.
Elaine went rigid.
Silver-white. There was silt tangled through it, and even so...
What was going on here?
He had no idea what to do. He tried to push himself up, but the body was too weak to feel like his own.
His waist and stomach ached, there was an unfamiliar weight on his chest, and the rain-soaked cloth clung to his skin, driving the cold into his bones one layer at a time. He looked down. There was a definite swell to his chest, and lower down... yes, he really could not detect the presence of the Supreme Bone.
His mind went blank first. Then the colour drained out of his face by degrees.
No... no, Elaine remembered. He remembered what he had done... All of it was wrong.
He wanted to swear. All that came out of his throat was a very small breath of sound.
It was thin, as though something had crushed it, and that faint sound arrived at last as a woman's voice, soft and a little sultry.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck, what the hell is going on?" This time Elaine had genuinely lost his footing. He had even come out with it in Chinese without thinking.
Feeling out his own body, unwilling as he was to admit it, the fact stood.
Elaine White, formerly a fallen young master, was now a white-haired... loli?
Taking in the changes to his body, Elaine badly wanted to complain, but for the moment he had no idea what he was supposed to do... come to think of it, where was this?
Taking in the sharp stink around him, he was at a loss. He knew nothing about what the capital of Castibury was saying about House White.
While he was still bewildered, footsteps came from a distance.
Boot soles through standing water, closer and closer.
Sensing something approach, Elaine instinctively wanted to shrink back, but he couldn't even prop himself up. All he could do was dig his fingers into the wet mud, trembling faintly with the pain.
The footsteps stopped in front of him, and a black umbrella cut off the falling rain.
Beneath its rim were a pair of cool grey-blue eyes.
The woman wore a dark coat with a short sword at her waist, and at her cuff showed a pattern Elaine half recognised but couldn't put a name to. Over all of it she wore a Judgment Tribunal raincoat.
Her eyes... and her dress, and her bearing, all of it was somewhat familiar, but his head hurt so badly just now that he couldn't call any of it up.
She stood in the rain and looked at him for a long time.
Elaine wanted to call out to her, but his mouth wouldn't shape a whole sound.
She crouched down slowly and reached out to push the soaked silver hair away from the side of his face.
Her fingertips paused against his cheek for a moment, as though feeling for something. A few seconds passed.
Then she took off her coat and wrapped the whole of him in it.
Her movements were very gentle. She lifted the feminised Elaine the way one lifts something breakable.
As she picked him up the pain drew a small sharp breath out of him, and his fingers caught at the front of her clothes without meaning to.
She tilted her head down to look at him. All either of them could hear was rain striking the umbrella. She did not ask him why he had turned out like this.
Elaine wanted to say something, but his head was swimming for no reason he could name. A fever, most likely. Feeling the warmth of her body, he found himself inexplicably at ease, and slipped without meaning to into sleep.
"Young Master Elaine." Watching the small girl in her arms go under, she said it quietly.
Beside Elaine's collarbone, a pale mark, almost transparent, flickered once and was gone.
Though when it came down to it, the White bloodline had probably reached its end after all.