Arianna Fiorelli was born in the northern reaches of Lurnea, where the wind never ceased and war was a season that never ended.
At the time, the banners of Arvannor and Lurnea had been clashing for years. Villages burned; grain wagons never arrived. Children learned the sound of hunger before they learned their prayers.
She never knew her parents. The sisters of a small church had found her and her younger brother wrapped in rags beside a frozen well. They were taken in, fed what little bread the church could spare.
But kindness meant little when there was no food left to give.
By the time Arianna turned six, her brother's ribs had become as sharp as the wind. He died in her arms one night, a crust of bread still clutched between his fingers.
She cried, she held him until the dawn came and the bells rang for morning prayer.
At seven, the church priest sold her.
A handful of coins—enough to feed the other orphans for a week—bought her a new life. Or perhaps it was only another form of survival.
The carriage that took her smelled of damp straw and candle wax. When it stopped, she found herself before the gates of House D'Amore, one of the noble families of Lurnea.
She had never seen stone walls so high, nor people who moved so gracefully.
For the first weeks, she did not speak. She watched how servants bowed, how they addressed their betters, how easily they could disappear for the smallest mistakes.
Fear was her first lesson. Obedience, her second.
And then she met Lady Sophia D'Amore—the baron's daughter.
The young mistress, pale as moonlight, had reached for her hand and smiled.
From that day on, the two were rarely apart. Sophia taught her to read in secret, to write her name when the others slept. When the girl grew older, the housekeeper formally assigned her to be Sophia's personal maid.
Years passed, but Arianna never truly learned what happiness meant. Her life was motion—rising before dawn, tending to her mistress, serving tea, folding gowns, keeping silent.
She had seen other servants dismissed in disgrace, dragged away for faults too small to name. She had heard their cries fade beyond the gates and never return.
So she learned stillness.
If she spoke little, if she made no errors, she could endure.
She would live. And she would protect her mistress, the one fragile piece of warmth that had ever reached her.