OH

Snezhnaya was a country built on contradictions. It was beautiful enough to make people forget how cruel it could be, with glittering palaces, frozen streets, grand theaters, and endless fields of white stretching beneath a merciless sky. In the center of one of its most elegant districts stood the Korolevsky Theater, where wealthy patrons came to forget the cold and ordinary people came to watch beautiful things they could never possess. Among all the performers, there was one woman everyone remembered. Nicolaa. She was the theater’s most celebrated ballerina, a young woman whose beauty had become almost legendary. Men sent flowers to her dressing room. Women copied the way she styled her hair. Patrons whispered about her whenever she crossed the lobby. She had pale, almost porcelain skin, dark hair that fell in soft waves around her face, large hazel-green eyes framed by thick lashes, full lips, delicate beauty marks, and an expression that always seemed slightly dreamy. She dressed in black silk, lace, ribbons, and delicate jewelry, making her look like something painted into an old portrait rather than someone who belonged in the modern world. Onstage, she was graceful enough to seem weightless. Offstage, she was quiet, polite, and strangely difficult to know. People adored her. Almost nobody understood her. Childe did. Or at least, he believed he did. Before he became one of the Fatui Harbingers, before his name carried weight throughout Snezhnaya, before he became known for his reckless fighting and endless appetite for danger, Childe had simply been a boy who grew up alongside Nicolaa. They had known each other for years. They had played together as children, wandered through snowy streets together, fought over stupid things, made up, shared secrets, and grown into people who could recognize each other’s moods without needing words. Childe had always been fascinated by her. Even when they were young, there had been something peculiar about Nicolaa. She was sweet, but sometimes too quiet. She could stare at something for an unsettlingly long time. She remembered things people forgot. She had a strange fascination with blood, bones, animals, and stories about people disappearing in the wilderness. Whenever someone asked what was wrong with her, Childe never had an answer. He only knew that something was. Not necessarily something bad. Just something different. Something he could never quite put into words. As they grew older, Childe’s feelings changed. Friendship became affection. Affection became devotion. Devotion became something much harder to name. He fell completely in love with Nicolaa, and unlike most people, he never tried to hide it. He was shameless about it. He flirted with her openly, teased her constantly, called her beautiful without the slightest embarrassment, and made it very clear that if she ever asked him to cross a line for her, he would do it without hesitation. Nicolaa knew. Of course she knew. Nicolaa noticed everything. She appreciated Childe more than almost anyone else in her life. He was familiar. Safe in his own strange way. He knew the girl she had been before the theater, before the attention, before the disappearances. He could make her laugh when almost nobody else could. He remembered things about her childhood that she had forgotten herself. He was one of the few people who could walk into her apartment without knocking. Yet there was one thing Nicolaa could never give him. Love. Not the kind he wanted. She cared about him deeply, but her feelings remained somewhere between affection, familiarity, and an attachment she could not quite define. Childe could spend his entire life loving her, and Nicolaa knew that. Sometimes she found it sweet. Sometimes she found it amusing. Sometimes, when she watched the way he looked at her, she felt something dangerously close to guilt. But guilt never made her love someone. Childe’s duties as a Harbinger frequently pulled him away from Snezhnaya. He disappeared for weeks or months at a time, leaving for Fatui business and returning with new scars, new stories, and the same unwavering devotion. Every time he came back, he sought Nicolaa first. He would find her backstage, wait outside the theater, or appear at her apartment as though no time had passed at all. He would complain about how much he had missed her, tell her about whatever mission had nearly killed him, and act as though their relationship had never changed. Nicolaa always welcomed him. She simply never gave him what he wanted. Childe pretended not to mind. He did mind. Terribly. He simply loved her enough to accept almost anything. If Nicolaa rejected him, he would wait. If she ignored him, he would wait. If she chose someone else, he would probably smile, congratulate her, and then quietly make certain the other person never became a problem again. His love had become possessive without him ever admitting it. He didn’t need Nicolaa to understand him. He only needed her to remain his. Then there was Mitya. Mitya had no childhood memories with Nicolaa. He had no history with her. He had never seen her as a little girl running through the snow or known what she looked like before the theater turned her into something almost untouchable. To him, she was a mystery. He worked at the Royal Energy Institute, where observation and analysis were part of his daily life, and that habit followed him into the theater. He first noticed Nicolaa during one of Vodyanitsa’s performances. He had gone there because of Vodyanitsa, whom he had been seeing for nearly a year. He should have been watching her. Instead, he found himself watching Nicolaa. Something about her performance bothered him. Not because she danced badly. She was extraordinary. It was because she seemed to be watching the audience rather than performing for them. Her eyes moved across the theater with quiet precision, stopping occasionally on particular people. One man in the front row caught her attention. She smiled at him. Two nights later, he disappeared. Mitya began paying attention. At first, it was harmless curiosity. He wrote down observations. He noticed when Nicolaa arrived, which doors she used, how long rehearsals lasted, where she went afterward, and which patrons repeatedly sought her attention. Then he noticed the disappearances. One man vanished. Then another. Then another. There were always explanations. People left the city. People traveled. People had enemies. Snezhnaya was enormous. Bodies could disappear beneath snow for weeks. There was no obvious connection between the missing men except for one detail that Mitya could not ignore: they had all been interested in Nicolaa. Soon his notebook stopped looking like research. It became a record of her. He followed her through the streets. He learned her routines. He watched the windows of her apartment from across the road. He memorized the nights she rehearsed late and the mornings she visited the same little shop for tea. He told himself that he was trying to solve something. That was only partly true. Mitya was becoming obsessed with Nicolaa herself. He wanted to know what existed beneath the beautiful exterior everyone else accepted without question. The more he watched, the stranger she became. Nicolaa seemed almost impossibly composed. She could stand beside a grieving family and offer sympathy with tears in her eyes, then walk away without the slightest change in expression. She could smile at a stranger while studying their hands. She remembered tiny details about people she had met only once. She kept private journals filled with names, dates, habits, and observations. Nothing in them openly revealed what she was. Yet something about them felt wrong. Nicolaa had always been fascinated by people. More specifically, she was fascinated by the idea of possessing them completely. Her cannibalism was not a simple appetite. It had become tangled with obsession, beauty, attachment, and insanity. She did not simply kill because she was hungry. She watched. She studied. She became interested. She let people become familiar to her before deciding whether they were worth keeping. In her mind, consuming someone was a grotesque form of permanence. People could leave. They could betray you. They could fall in love with someone else. They could disappear without explanation. But something that became part of you could never walk away. Nicolaa found comfort in that idea. She knew it was wrong. She simply didn’t care. That was what made her frightening. She wasn’t unaware of what she was doing. She understood perfectly. She just didn’t share everyone else’s disgust. Mitya gradually began to suspect that the beautiful ballerina was connected to the disappearances. He could not prove it. He couldn’t even explain why he believed it. There was simply a pattern in his notes that seemed to point toward her again and again. The strangest part was that Nicolaa seemed aware of his investigation. She would sometimes look directly at him from across the theater. Sometimes she would smile. Once, she left a small black ribbon on the seat beside him. Mitya took it home. He kept it. That should have frightened him. Instead, it made his obsession worse. Nicolaa had noticed him. She had chosen him out of everyone in the room. And somewhere inside her, something about Mitya had begun to fascinate her as well. He was different from the men she usually encountered. He wasn’t simply captivated by her beauty. He wanted answers. He wanted to understand the strange pauses in her speech, the distant look in her eyes, the disappearances, the way she seemed to know when someone was watching her. Nicolaa began watching him back.