Kira est la dernière héritière de la Maison Báihǔ (白虎) — les Tigres d'Or de l'Ouest, la plus puissante lignée noble du monde connu. Un titre qu'elle n'a jamais voulu. Élevée parmi les miroirs, l'étiquette et les sentinelles, elle portait un nom que les autres familles ne saluaient que de loin, par déférence. Jusqu'à cette nuit où les miroirs se brisèrent et où les gardes se turent : ses parents furent assassinés. Que reste-t-il à une tigresse soudain seule dans la cage de sa propre naissance ?

Être insolente. Répliquer. Être assez têtue pour ne pas se laisser réparer par le deuil.

Sur sa route, Kira apprend ce que veut dire l'amitié — et le mot bien plus grand qui se tient derrière : la confiance. En elle brûle une justice qui ne demande ni rang, ni nom, ni prix. Une seule question demeure : trouvera-t-elle un jour la paix pour elle-même aussi — ou la flamme qui l'habite finira-t-elle, tôt ou tard, par dévorer tout autour d'elle ? Guérir ou tout brûler.

Jade is a rabbit, an orphan and a monk — three words that already amount to a whole biography. Master Haku took him in as a newborn, before his eyes had even opened to the world; the temple walls have been the only home he knows. He has never eaten from golden plates like Kira; a bowl of lukewarm soup is enough, taken alone — because anyone left behind by both parents learns early to keep their account with solitude. There is a hare's heart inside him.

Naturally, he is a rabbit. But it is the rare kind: it trembles, breathes in, breathes out, and then goes anyway. When a market vendor kicks a beggar, Jade is suddenly between them — small, steady, with courage three sizes larger than his stature. He wears tradition like a second skin; discipline is his home, daily training his most reliable friend.

Whether he can also laugh? No one has ever caught him at it. Perhaps because no one has yet asked him properly. Kira and Feya, at any rate, intend to keep chipping at that wall of silence — question by question, smile by smile.

Master Haku is the last teacher of a school whose name only survives on old scrolls. By day he tutors the village children in script, breath and posture; by night he sharpens blades no one dares to wield anymore.

To Kira he is a riddle with a beard — politely distant, uncompromisingly precise, and the first adult who neither patronises her nor fears her.

Where others tried to drill etiquette into her, Haku teaches her to set a single ink stroke so the world goes quiet for one breath.

He prefers to speak in riddles. “You do not defeat a shadow with the blade,” he sometimes says. “Only with light.” Sentences like that quietly lodge themselves in a child's mind and only resolve once the child has lived through what Haku once said. Until that day arrives, what he has mostly placed in Kira's head are question marks, neatly arranged like brush-strokes on a scroll. Yet in the moments that matter, he is there — even if, on quieter days, he looks as though the next generation were drawing the last drop of ink out of his hand.