Kira è l'ultima erede della Casa Báihǔ (白虎) — le Tigri Dorate dell'Occidente, il lignaggio nobile più potente del mondo conosciuto. Un titolo che non ha mai voluto. Cresciuta tra specchi, etichetta e sentinelle, portava un nome che le altre famiglie salutavano soltanto da rispettosa distanza. Fino alla notte in cui gli specchi si frantumarono e le guardie tacquero: i suoi genitori furono assassinati. Che cosa resta a una tigre improvvisamente sola nella gabbia delle proprie origini?

Essere sfacciata. Ribattere. Essere abbastanza testarda da non lasciarsi riparare dal lutto.

Lungo la sua strada Kira impara cosa significhi davvero amicizia — e la parola molto più grande che le sta dietro: fiducia. In lei brucia una giustizia che non chiede né rango, né nome, né prezzo. Resta solo una domanda: se troverà mai pace anche per sé stessa — o se la fiamma che la abita, prima o poi, divorerà tutto intorno a lei. Guarigione o distruzione.

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.