PROLOGUE
Dans le jardin des lys morts
In the Garden of Dead Lilies
The cemetery on the hill looked that day like a slumbering fortress of black marble. A cold January wind slid across the headstones, producing a sound almost like a whisper—as if someone in the air were trying to tell a story no one dared to speak aloud. The Bavarian sky was leaden, heavy with snow that had not yet fallen, though it hung above them like a threat.
The crowd gathered around the freshly dug grave resembled a single organism, woven together from the black of coats, hats, and veils. Aristocrats, dignitaries, relatives, and associates of the von Weigert family stood in perfect, almost military order, as though even grief were required to follow protocol.
At the center of that darkness stood a girl dressed in white.
Viridia.
Twelve years old, fragile, almost invisible, and yet impossible to overlook. Her gown was simple, long, and snow-white—a color so shockingly inappropriate that her very presence felt forbidden. The whiteness of the dress caught the light so sharply she seemed to glow with her own radiance, as if the winter sun had hidden itself only so it could reflect off her.
Her platinum hair, loose and wind-tossed, was so pale it looked as though it had been spun from threads of silver. When the wind brushed her cheeks, a few strands slipped free and danced around her face—a face too delicate, too pure, too... unearthly.
But her eyes were the strangest of all.
One—pale grey, steely, cold, like the surface of a lake in winter.
The other—deep, dark brown, the color of the fresh earth that now covered the tiny coffin of her sister.
Both were fixed on the same point: the white coffin resting a few meters before her.
Viridia did not blink. She did not tremble. She did not move even when the first clod of earth struck the lid of the coffin, releasing a dull, heavy sound that split the air like a snapped string.
She did not cry.
Not because she did not want to.
But because she did not know how.
She stood motionless, her hands clasped in front of her. Had anyone looked closely, they would have seen her fingers digging so hard into her own skin that her knuckles had turned white. Yet her face remained perfectly still—unnaturally calm, as though no emotion could break through.
As though grief had no right to touch her the way it touched other children.
A few steps behind her stood Anabelle de Lysière—her mother, though the word "mother" felt like an exaggeration. She was beautiful in a cold, sculpted way: tall, with black hair, cool eyes, and a face so serene it was unsettling. At her own child's funeral she shed not a single tear. Her hands, wrapped in black gloves, were clasped loosely, as though she stood there not as a parent but as a guest who had wandered into the wrong ceremony.
She did not look at Viridia.
Not with concern.
Not with anger.
Not with sorrow.
She never looked at her at all.
Beside Anabelle stood Alistair von Weigert—the father, impossible to miss. Nearly two meters tall, broad-shouldered, imposing, wearing a tailored black coat fitted so precisely it could have been made for a king. His eyes—steel, deep—tried to stay unmoved, but the trembling of his fingers and the hard line of his jaw betrayed him.
He stared ahead at the horizon, not at his daughter.
He knew that if he looked at her now, he might never rise out of that grief again.
And she?
She did not seek his gaze.
She did not seek anyone's.
She stood alone in a world that had just rejected her.
The priest spoke of innocence, of angels, of returning to God. The words lingered in the air—heavy, thick, sticky. They drifted above the crowd without truly touching anyone, as though they were nothing more than an obligation, a mask for consciences long since frozen.
And she remained still, motionless, as though spellbound.
Her gaze did not waver, not even when the coffin began to disappear beneath the earth, swallowed by layers of damp, dark soil. There were no tears in her eyes, but—if one watched long enough—there was something far worse.
A void.
A silence.
The beginning of something no one yet had a name for.
As though in that twelve-year-old form a new awareness was being born—deep, dark, dangerous as water at the bottom of a well.
No one said it aloud.
But everyone who saw the photograph—and very few ever saw it—knew one thing:
This was not the funeral of one child.
It was the funeral of two.
Jolie was buried in the earth.
Viridia—in the light that never returned to her again.
When the coffin vanished and the last shovelful of earth covered its lid, the wind strengthened and struck the girl's white dress as if trying to knock her down. But she remained unshaken.
And in that moment—the first second after the coffin was covered—something in her eyes changed irreversibly.
Once, they had reflected light.
Now, they consumed it.
The world might not have noticed.
But years later, it would become clear that here—
in the shadow of black coats,
in the scent of dead lilies,
in the cold that settled on bones like dust—
something nameless had been born.
A girl protected only by her own darkness.
Blanche Lys was born.
An angel-faced Lucifer was born.
Viridia von Weigert was born.
