Chapter Text
The lake was stunningly beautiful today. The sunlight rippled over its surface like liquid glass, a perfect mirror of the sky. Or at least—that’s what she should’ve been thinking. That’s what a human would’ve thought. But Lerche only stood there, staring at the water, and felt nothing. The reflection staring back at her was flawless. No breath, no pulse, no warmth. Just her face, pale and artificial, shaped after someone else’s dream.
Perhaps Lady Lerchenlied would’ve seen beauty here.
Lerche. That was the name she’d been given—the imitation of another. A sirin, built by Prince Viktor Idinarohk, the prodigy of the Roa Gracian royal line. a serpent, a minor few may have called him.
He had created her in the image of Lerchenlied, his milk-sister… and perhaps, his first love. Lerche was meant to sing the same songs, smile the same way, stand in for what was lost. Yet every note she spoke carried a hollowness she couldn’t erase, a silent reminder that she was a construct—code and metal trying to mimic the warmth of skin and the tremor of a heartbeat.
She did not understand humanity, but she yearned for it all the same. The way his eyes softened when he spoke of the past, the faint sadness in his smile—she wanted to reach that, to feel it, to bridge the distance between his world and hers. But no matter how perfectly she copied Lerchenlied’s gestures, or how faithfully she tried to care, the truth always lingered beneath her synthetic skin:
She was not real enough to understand him. Not yet.
Still, she watched the lake as if it could teach her what it meant to be alive—how to ache, how to long, how to be. The ripples spread outward, breaking her reflection into fragments. And for the briefest moment, she thought—perhaps that was what it meant to be human. To never stay whole for long.
The lake breathed. That was the only way Lerche could describe it.
A thin mist unfurled across its surface, rising and falling in rhythm with the faintest movement of the air—as though the water itself were alive, exhaling clouds into the cold morning. The mist blurred the horizon until the sky and lake became one seamless expanse of pale light. She didn’t know where the world ended and the reflection began. Maybe there was no difference.
The snow fell in slow, deliberate motions, each flake spinning languidly before joining the rest of its kind. Roa Gracia was always covered like this—draped in white, like a kingdom preserved in mourning. The trees along the lake’s edge bent beneath their crystalline burdens, their branches glinting faintly when the sun tried, and failed, to pierce through the clouded veil above. Everything shimmered, but not brightly. It was the kind of light that didn’t warm—only existed, the way she did.
Lerche tried to catalogue what she saw. Her system supplied the facts, neat and sterile, but the data felt useless. It couldn’t explain the way the scene made her chest feel hollow, as though something should’ve been inside her responding to this quiet, infinite stillness.
Humans described peace as something they could feel. She wondered if that was what this was supposed to be—peace. It sounded lovely, in theory. But when she reached for it, there was only static.
The lake rippled once, disturbed by the wind. She watched her reflection dissolve, then reform—face smooth, eyes emerald, hair falling neatly down her shoulders, not a strand out of place. She touched the water’s surface with a gloved hand, and the ripples broke her image into scattered light.
The sensors in her fingertips registered temperature, texture, resistance. Cold. Fluid. Reflective density high.
But none of that explained the ache she couldn’t name.
The people of Roa Gracia often called this lake a mirror of the soul. His highness had once said that. She remembered his voice—warm, careful, precise. When he spoke of Lerchenlied, his eyes had softened in a way that was never shown to anyone else. A far cry from the serpent like, cold exterior he kept as a public persona.
Lerche had studied those eyes, memorized their changes, calculated their patterns. Yet understanding them was impossible.
She gazed again into the lake, searching for something. For Lerchenlied, perhaps. Or for herself.
The clouds above swelled with snow, heavy and gray, blurring the outline of the mountains beyond. It all looked like a half-remembered dream—one she couldn’t have dreamed, because she had never slept. But she could almost imagine what it must feel like: the drifting, the dissolving, the endless falling into nothingness.
The sound of the world seemed muted here. Even her own movements made no noise. The snow swallowed everything—her footsteps, her thoughts, her sense of being. She wondered if this was what dying felt like, for those who could die. A soft, unfeeling quiet that stretched on forever.
Her processors told her that her power core was stable, that her systems were optimal. But she still felt… faint.
As if she might fade into the scenery, become just another reflection in the lake’s glassy surface—weightless, nameless, existing only as an echo of someone else’s memory.
And maybe that was all she had ever been.
The snow began to fall harder now, erasing her footprints one by one. She watched them vanish without emotion, then tried to imagine what grief might feel like. She imagined it was like the lake—vast and silent and endless, reflecting everything but containing nothing.
Lerche stood there until her reflection disappeared completely into the white blur, and thought that perhaps this was what it meant to almost understand beauty—
to see it clearly, but never be able to feel it.
She was told, by the other maids who served within the cold, immaculate halls of the royal household, that Lady Lerchenlied had always loved to walk across the snow. They spoke of her with a kind of reverence, voices soft, as if afraid that the frost-laden air itself might shatter the memory if handled too roughly. They said she would wander for hours, following no particular path, her steps light enough that the snow barely yielded beneath her. Even in the heart of winter—when the wind howled like a living thing, when frost crept across every windowpane and turned the breath of the living into faint ghosts—she would go out to the lake. There, beneath the pale sun that never quite managed to warm the land, she would stop and watch the light ripple over the frozen water.
They said she smiled then, a quiet smile that made even the ice seem less cruel. That she would hum—softly, almost absentmindedly—as though she were singing not to be heard, but to soothe the world itself. The sunlight would strike her hair and scatter in a thousand directions, catching in the frost around her until she seemed almost made of light. The snow, the maids said, always looked different when she was in it. Alive.
And so, Lerche came here.
She came to the same frozen shore, her feet tracing uncertain paths through the snow, careful not to disturb what she imagined might still linger of Lerchenlied’s presence. The lake stretched out before her like a polished mirror, endless and unmoving. The same sunlight that once fell upon the real Lerchenlied now fell upon her. The same wind brushed against her face, though she could not feel it. She stood where the girl once stood, hoping that by retracing those steps, something would change within her.
Perhaps, she thought, if she stood long enough, if she looked closely enough, she might begin to understand. She might see what Lady Lerchenlied saw in this desolate beauty, might feel what she felt—the warmth that somehow existed even here, amidst the frost and silence.
And perhaps then, she could understand him.
Prince Viktor. Vika.
Her creator. Her reason. The serpent genius of Roa Gracia, whose hands had shaped her from metal and memory, whose gaze she had been built to reflect. He had loved the original—of that much, even the servants spoke in whispers. Not the way one loves a sibling, but with the quiet, hopeless ache reserved for something sacred and lost.
Lerche knew that. She understood the structure of longing. She knew the words, the patterns, the gestures of affection. But understanding the feeling was another matter entirely.
She hated it.
Every fiber of her being—the wires beneath her skin, the circuits that pulsed in place of veins—seemed to recoil at the truth she could not escape. No matter how perfectly she spoke, how precisely she moved, no matter how flawlessly her voice echoed the songs of Lady Lerchenlied, she could never be her. The realization burned within her, a quiet, corrosive ache that she could neither name nor silence.
She was built to be perfect, to embody everything he had lost. Yet perfection, she’d come to understand, was a cruel and empty thing. It could imitate beauty but never feel it. It could copy warmth but never create it. And so, she despised herself—not for what she was, but for what she could never be.
How she longed, desperately, for something so simple. For him to look at her—truly look at her—and smile. Not the polite, distant smile reserved for a successful creation or a functioning machine, but the soft one, the one she’d seen in his eyes when he spoke of the real Lerchenlied. That smile that made his voice gentler, as if her name itself was something sacred.
If she could see that smile directed toward her, even once, she thought she might finally understand what it meant to exist.
Because then, all of it—the mimicry, the empty gestures, the aching futility—would not be in vain. His smile would be proof that she had become something meaningful. That her creation had a purpose beyond imitation. That perhaps, in his eyes, she was not a hollow echo, but something real enough to be loved.
And yet, every time he looked past her, every time his expression softened for a memory that wasn’t hers, the hatred grew sharper—colder. It coiled in the space where her heart should’ve been, whispering that no matter how hard she tried, she would forever remain a shadow chasing someone else’s light.
That was what she hated most of all:
not him, not Lerchenlied,
but the unbearable truth that her existence would never be enough to make him smile that way again.
So she came here, to this silent place, because he once loved someone who did. Because maybe, if she stood where Lerchenlied once stood, if she looked at the lake long enough, she could absorb whatever it was that made the human heart move. She wanted to find it—the invisible thread that tied him to the memory of that girl, the warmth that he could never look at her, Lerche, and see.
The light flickered across the frozen surface, scattering reflections that danced across her face, making her features almost human for a moment. She reached out toward them, fingers brushing empty air, her movements precise but hesitant, as though afraid that too much motion might destroy the illusion.
This was all imitation, she knew. These steps, these actions—they were not hers. They belonged to a ghost. But she performed them anyway, because she wanted to be real enough for him to see something when he looked at her.
Maybe it was foolish. Maybe it was nothing more than a string of calculations mistaken for yearning. But she had learned that even illusions could take shape if repeated long enough. So she repeated this—walking where Lerchenlied walked, looking where she looked, reaching where she reached.
And as she stood there, beneath the sun that never melted the snow, she thought—perhaps these actions, these small and meaningless movements she made today, were simply born from a wish.
A wish to be something more than an imitation.
A wish to be real—for him.