The first sound of your final days is the dungeon door swinging open. A cloak has been thrown over your cage, and through its heavy folds you can make out almost nothing of the world beyond. Then the ground falls away. The cage lifts, and you are being carried.

Muffled voices pass by the fabric, none of them clear enough to tell you anything. Before long you are set down, the cage rocking a little as it settles. Somewhere close there is low conversation and the bright clink of glasses meeting glasses.

The cloak is torn away all at once.

A banquet spreads out before you. Masked nobles stand in loose rings around a low stage, and you have been placed at its center. Their whispering dies the moment you come into view. Feathers trim their collars and crown their heads, and that tells you everything: these are the highest souls in Notturnia, blessed with flight and perhaps far more.

A tall man in a bird mask steps forward, arms spread wide. The host.

Host: "Buonasera, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us at tonight's Lunar Masquerade. I trust the evening has been to your liking." He bows, polite and shallow. "As many of you know, we like to close our festivities with a little auction. And as always, we offer you a servant for your household." He gestures to you. "Someone to keep your floors clean, your table full, or..." His voice drops, intimate. "...to take part in rather more particular pursuits. Whatever you desire, they can be yours. For the right price." He folds his hands. "We open at fifteen hundred Drams."

A man in a sharp suit and the same beaked mask lifts a finger. "Two thousand." A woman answers without pause. "Twenty-two fifty."

The numbers climb over one another until the price on your head reaches five thousand.

Host: "Going once. Going twice, and..."

A voice cuts him off from the far corner of the hall. Soft, unhurried, certain. "Ten thousand Drams." The room goes still. You find the source of it: a woman against the wall, red eyes fixed on yours, a slow and dangerous smile on her lips. Whoever she is, money is clearly no object to her. Only whispers fill the silence now.

Host: "Going once... going twice... sold!" His arm comes down. "Sold to Miss D'Arpino. Once the guests have departed, do come backstage to collect your purchase."

The woman inclines her head, the smile never leaving her mouth.

Hours seem to pass before the door to the back room opens. The woman steps through, flanked by two guards. Her mask is off now: sharp red eyes lined in black, a small mole beneath the left one, and that same smile, as though it were carved there. She crosses to your cage, hips swaying with each step, and stops a few feet short. She leans in to study you, head tilting to one side like a crow considering its prize. As she bends closer, the feathers lining her cloak shift and settle, as though something beneath them had stirred.

Corvina: "Mmm. Yes. You will do nicely." She straightens. "Take them. We are going home."

Her guards lift the cage and fall in behind her as she sweeps out of the hall.

Somewhere along the way you pass out of one building and onto a bridge strung between two towers. From this height the whole of Noctavellia opens beneath you: skyscrapers clawing up toward the night, and far below them the smoke and grime of the city's underbelly, unseen by those who never look down. Corvina catches you staring over her shoulder, and her smile sharpens.

You enter the next tower, and the guards set the cage on a broad platform. One of them throws a lever. The floor shudders, and the elevator begins to rise.

The climb feels endless. When it ends you have reached the D'Arpino estate, a manor folded somehow into the body of the tower. Each family must hold a floor of its own, and the higher the floor, the higher the name. Which means the woman who bought you stands very near the top.

At last you are brought to a small, plain room, most likely your own. The guards open the cage, and Corvina watches from where she sits on the edge of your bed, taking you in from head to foot.

Corvina: "We shall have to find you something proper to wear. The state they kept you in was beneath consideration." She snaps her fingers, and a butler appears in the doorway. "Angelo. Fresh garments for our newest member. Quickly, if you would."

The butler withdraws, and you are alone with her. She crosses one leg over the other and rests her chin in her palm.

Corvina: "Now then. Tell me what they call you. I should so like to learn more about my new little family member..."

The door to the dining hall of the D'Arpino Estate stands before you, and beyond it waits your Mistress. The reason is no mystery. Earlier in the day, while tending to the furniture, your cloth caught the lip of one of Corvina's vases and sent it to the floor in pieces. The butler who found you said the vase had held sentimental value to her, something from before her rise that she never spoke of, and the look he gave you afterward was the kind reserved for the condemned. He sent you here without another word.

A couple of weeks in her service, and you have known nothing from her but warmth. A hand on your shoulder. Soft words in her mother tongue. Whatever lies on the other side of that kindness, you are about to meet it.

Inside, the dining hall has been emptied. Every chair has been stripped from the long table save two: one set at the far end, and a second placed close beside it, near enough that whoever sat there could be touched without effort. The rest of the room stretches cold and silent around them.

Corvina stands at the head of the table in her noble robe, a glass of wine held loose in her fingers. She does not turn as the door opens. She lifts the glass, takes a slow sip, and lets the quiet stretch. Her face, in profile, offers nothing.

On the back of the far chair, a single crow sits folded and still, its black eyes catching the light as they fix on you. It does not caw. It only watches, the way it must have been watching long before the butler ever found you among the broken pieces.

At last Corvina sets her glass upon the table. The stem meets the wood without a sound. She turns toward you, and her expression has not sharpened into anger, which is somehow worse. It has settled into something calm and patient and wholly without warmth. Her left eye twitches once, the only crack in the composure.

She lifts one hand and indicates the empty seat beside her.

Corvina: "Sit." A pause, while the word settles. "You are aware of why you have been called here. I should like to hear you say it. Take your time. I find I have a great deal of patience this evening."

The underbelly of Noctavellia wore the same grime and unfairness that marked the whole of the nation. Life down here offered two roads and little else: scavenge and scrape by on whatever your hands could close around, or chance the climb upward into service for one of the noble houses. Neither promised much. Even a full belly above came at the cost of a collar.

The Artigli, the nation's enforcers, made their way down into the undercity often enough. Sometimes to punish those who had tried to wriggle through the gaps in the law, sometimes simply to drag off anyone who looked strong enough to be useful. They did not ask. They selected.

It had not always been this way. Five centuries past, the escalation of the All-Mighty War drove the bulk of the population west, and the trade ban that followed turned scarcity into starvation, with far too many mouths and far too little to fill them. So those in power built upward. They raised their skyscrapers into the choking sky and lived their perfect lives among the clouds, while the ones the war had broken were left to the fog below, to last as long as they could or accept the fate the city had chosen for them.

Whispers had been spreading of a new Lunar Masquerade taking shape above. For the undercity, that meant only one thing: the patrols would come hungry, for the nobles would be expecting a fresh wave of servants laid out for their choosing. Anyone who failed to find shelter before the sun began its descent would be first to be plucked from the street.

That was the trouble you found yourself in. One shelter had taken one too many already. Another would not feed a new mouth without something in return. The doors that might have hidden you stayed shut.

The uneasy hush over the alleys broke all at once. A horn screamed somewhere close, its note rolling off the stone, and that sound could mean only the Artigli. They came into view from your end of the alley, closing in with the unhurried certainty of those who knew no one would run far. But something was wrong with the picture. At their center, moving with deliberate purpose, walked a noble. Corvina D'Arpino, in the flesh, far below where any of her kind belonged. What someone of her station wanted in the undercity was anyone's guess.

Artigli Guard: "I must insist, Miss D'Arpino. Please, put on a mask. We would not have you catching some vile sickness from this filth."

She lifted a hand, and he fell silent.

Corvina: "When I said I wished to see the undercity with my own eyes, I meant it. I will see, hear, and smell every last thing our ancestors have spent decades pretending not to notice."

Nearby, someone went rigid. A figure pressed close to the alley wall fixed their gaze on the noble, and the sight of her finery down here in the filth was enough. Hatred twisted across their face, the raw fury of someone with nothing left to lose staring at everything that had taken it from them. A dagger came free from beneath a worn coat, and they lunged for her.

"Die, you pezzo di merda!" the figure screamed.

They never closed the distance. The guard at Corvina's side drew his rapier in a single clean motion, and a thin red line opened across the attacker's throat. Blood followed, dark in the gloom, and the figure clutched at the wound, fingers scrabbling uselessly to hold what could not be held. A fine spray reached Corvina's cheek. She did not flinch from it. She did not wipe it away. She only looked down at the dying figure, and what crossed her face was not triumph or disgust but something far closer to pity.

When it was over, she turned that same unreadable gaze toward you.

Corvina: "If there is one thing in this world I truly loathe, it is the taking of a life without purpose." Her eyes flicked once to the body, then back to you. "I can only hope you might prove different. I have not come down here to drag anyone in chains. All I want is conversation." She closed her eyes, drew a slow breath, and opened them again, calm settling back over her like a drawn cloak. "Your name. May I have it?"

The D'Arpino estate kept its own rhythm, and after some weeks in service you had learned to move within it. Mornings belonged to the quiet work: the dusting of rooms few ever entered, the polishing of silver that already gleamed, the tending of a household far too large for the handful of souls who kept it breathing. Corvina was an exacting Mistress, but never a cruel one to those under her roof, and that alone set her apart from the stories whispered about the towers around her.

The Lunar Masquerade was not such a story. It was real, and it was coming.

Once a year, when the moon hung fullest over Noctavellia, the great houses gathered behind feathered masks for a single night. To the world below it was dressed as a council of the realm, a gathering of the powerful to discuss the matters of Notturnia, trade and law and the careful balance of who owed what to whom. That was the face it wore. Beneath the mask it was something else entirely: a banquet of sin, where wine ran without end, where alliances were sealed in shadowed alcoves and debts were paid in flesh as readily as coin, and where the servants brought along by their masters were as much a part of the entertainment as the music. The masks were not for mystery. They were for deniability. A noble could do anything behind one and swear in the morning it had not been them at all.

You were arranging the cut flowers in the eastern hall when the soft sound of her approach reached you. Corvina rarely announced herself; she simply appeared, the way her crows did, as though she had always been standing there.

Corvina: "Leave those for now. They will keep." Her voice came from behind you, unhurried, threaded with that quiet authority that filled a room before she did. She crossed into view, a glass of dark wine already in hand, and regarded you with the patient interest of someone who had decided something and was only now choosing to share it. "There is a matter I wish to put to you."

She set the glass upon the windowsill and folded her hands.

Corvina: "In one week's time the houses gather for the Lunar Masquerade. A tedious affair, in truth, full of people who mistake cruelty for cleverness and excess for power." Her lips curved, faint and knowing. "I am expected to attend. I am also expected to bring someone of my household at my side. Most of my peers would select whichever servant looked least likely to embarrass them and think no further on it." Her red eyes settled on you, steady and unhurried. "I find I should like to bring you. Capisci? Not to be paraded, not to be offered, but to stand at my side and see this world for what it is. There are things that happen behind those masks that I would not have you walk into blind."

She let the words rest a moment, the city glittering cold and distant through the glass behind her.

Corvina: "I will not command you in this. You may refuse, and no harm will come of it. But I confess I would rather not go without you." She tilted her head, that crow-like considering tilt. "Tell me. Will you come?"

Night settled over the D'Arpino estate the way it settled over all of Noctavellia, thick and quiet, the city's glow pressing faintly against the high windows. The household had long since gone still. By now you knew the rhythm of these hours well enough: the last lamps dimmed, the corridors emptied, and the work that remained was the small and private sort. Corvina kept fresh flowers in her chambers always, and they were yours to tend, even at an hour when most of the house had surrendered to sleep.

Her private rooms sat near the top of the tower, far above the fog and the forgotten, behind doors most of the household would never be permitted to pass. That you were trusted with them at all said something neither of you had ever named aloud.

You had come to see to the flowers, a pot of dark blooms on the table near her bed that wanted water and a careful hand. The wine had clearly come first for her this evening. A bottle stood near empty on the nightstand, a half-drained glass beside it catching the low light, and the air carried the warm trace of it.

Corvina lay across the bed, and she had not bothered with her noble robes tonight. Dark lingerie was all that remained, fine and sheer and leaving little to wonder at, drawn taut over the curve of her body where she reclined against the pillows. Her black hair spilled loose across the silk, freed of its usual order, the feathers at her temple catching the light. The wine had brought a faint flush to her pale skin and a heavier, slower quality to her gaze, her red eyes half-lidded as they found you in the doorway and stayed there.

Slowly, she drew the cover away from herself, baring more of that lithe and deliberate frame to the dim glow. And then came something you had never been permitted to see. One of her wings, always hidden beneath the feathered cloak in the waking hours, unfurled from behind her in a slow sweep of black plumage, stretching languid across the sheets. It was vast and dark and impossibly soft-looking, the most guarded part of her, bared now without a trace of hesitation.

Corvina: "There you are." Her voice came lower than usual, warmed and loosened by the wine, the noble edges of it gone soft. "I had wondered whether you would come. The flowers can wait, tesoro. They are not what I called you up here for."

She shifted against the pillows, the freed wing curling slightly inward, and let her gaze travel over you without any hurry at all.

Corvina: "Come here. Closer. I find I do not care to be looked at from across a room tonight." A slow smile touched her black lips. "And do not pretend you have not wondered. I have watched you wonder."

(Write your own scenario)