The subtle tremor in Leandro Volkov’s hand, reaching for the chilled flask Niccolò offered, spoke of a night spent in the company of dissolute pleasures. Niccolò tossed the crystal container onto the polished cypress table. A faint clink. The ducal scriptorium, usually a sanctuary of hushed study, still held the lingering scent of stale wine and an ill-advised perfume from the noble’s garments.
“A tonic, my lord. To banish the specter of a blowfish’s visage.” Niccolò’s voice, though level, carried the precise, dry edge of long-held resentment.
Leandro, accustomed to this morning ritual—a cold cordial on days his nocturnal indulgences left him visibly haggard—offered a languid smile. “Ever the meticulous cartographer, Niccolò. You chart my every excess with painful accuracy.”
“Did your father’s steward not rouse you with his usual sermon?”
“Spared, thanks to your, ah, timely interventions.” Leandro’s shrug was an act of practiced nonchalance, a gesture that sliced deeper than any insult. Niccolò merely pressed his lips together, a thin line of controlled frustration.
Turning to find his own stool, Niccolò’s gaze snagged on the adjacent table. A rolled parchment, meticulously inked, lay half-unfurled. It was not his. Lorenzo Santini, Leandro’s new confidant, now occupied the space beside him.
Santini, who seemed to measure his words as carefully as he measured his social standing, rarely betrayed such unguardedness. Niccolò, a man who measured his own worth in the precision of his intellect rather than the breadth of his shoulders, felt a familiar, bitter pang. His internal map of Santini – a charming, politically astute but intellectually unchallenging noble – suddenly felt wildly inaccurate.
Burying the unwelcome revision of his mental cartography, Niccolò spoke, his voice cool. “When did Santini arrive?”
“No idea,” Leandro mumbled, already tilting the flask to his lips. “He was like that when I stumbled in.”
“Yet he retired early last night. Why does he appear as though he’s battled the Maremma’s bandits all night?”
A rustle answered him. The parchment shifted, revealing Lorenzo’s half-lidded eyes. A slow, stretching yawn escaped his lips, a silent gasp that seemed to pull the very air from the room. His narrow gaze swept over Niccolò and Leandro.
“...I told myself I’d just puzzle over the constellations a little longer before sleep. And, well.” He gestured vaguely at the star charts on the table. Niccolò felt a strange tickle under his skin, a shiver that had nothing to do with the scriptorium’s morning chill.
Leandro let out a bark of laughter, a jarring sound in the quiet space. “This man! He carries himself like a dissolute poet, yet he toils with greater diligence than Master Bellini’s apprentices.”
“Careful, Leandro,” Lorenzo drawled, pulling the parchment over his face once more. “Your compliments sting.”
“Precisely, you insufferable bore.”
Lorenzo, whether amused or simply too tired to care, leaned back, a low chuckle rumbling from beneath the chart. Niccolò watched him for a beat, their eyes meeting over the edge of the rolled paper. A subtle flicker of understanding, or perhaps a challenge, passed between them. Niccolò, unnerved, turned his attention to Leandro, scratching at an unseen itch on his forearm.
The early morning in the scriptorium was usually a quiet communion. Scholars bent over texts, apprentices meticulously copying charts. These exchanges between Leandro and Lorenzo, though laced with aristocratic bite, often set a vibrant, if not entirely wholesome, tone. Soon, younger scribes and ambitious courtiers would gather, drawn by Leandro’s magnetic pull, eager to glean scraps of courtly gossip or political insight.
For men considered the very embodiment of Volterran grace and influence, it was a surprisingly unrefined start to the day. Yet, for all its rough edges, Niccolò often found these mornings bearable. A predictable rhythm, a known map. But everything shifted six weeks past. And the reason was entirely the presence of Elias.
“Look, Elias is here.”
“By the Saints, that wretch.”
“Does that miserable excuse for a scholar truly dare show his face after the humiliation he suffered?”
A young scribe, Pompeo, openly mocked Elias, pointing with exaggerated disdain. At the tip of Pompeo’s finger, Elias shuffled into the scriptorium, his shoulders hunched, his face partially hidden by a stray lock of dark hair. He moved towards a small, sequestered desk in the corner, placed his threadbare satchel upon it, and immediately slumped over. Watching that pathetic, hunched figure, Niccolò let out a sigh laden with a sudden, sharp irritation.
Elias was utterly without grace. His voice was thin, his frame slight—a pitiful excuse for a man in a city that prized robust, confident intellect. As the murmurs of the scriptorium swelled, Leandro glared daggers at Elias’s back, muttering curses under his breath. Niccolò hated it. That raw, undisguised contempt in Leandro’s gaze—it gnawed at him.
Snatching a discarded, poorly-rendered sketch of a coastline from his own table, Leandro balled it up in one hand. Then, with a light flick of his wrist, he hurled it. *Thud*. The wadded parchment struck Elias’s head with a soft sound. Elias’s head slumped further onto his desk.
“By the inferno! Do not parade that pathetic countenance before us first thing in the morning.”
Elias placed his arms on the desk, burying his face in them, doing exactly as Leandro had commanded. Yet, Leandro watched him with disdain, then kicked the leg of his own table, a sharp, resounding crack.
“Answer me, you sniveling coward!”
When Leandro abruptly stood and bellowed, Elias, still hunched over, stammered in a trembling voice. “Y-yes, my lord.”
“Lift your head. Look at me. Speak with the courage of a man, not a frightened mouse.”
Did Leandro even comprehend the sheer absurdity of his demands? The utter disproportion of it all. Niccolò felt a bitter, mirthless laugh catch in his throat.
Whether or not he noticed Niccolò’s quiet revulsion, Leandro moved. He approached Elias’s desk. With every measured step he took, the unpleasant feelings inside Niccolò grew more vivid, more raw, twisting in his gut like a poisoned serpent.
Leandro closed the distance between them. Just that proximity made Niccolò feel as though he was losing control over the emotions he’d worked so diligently to suppress. This wasn’t the familiar ache of jealousy he felt when Leandro offered Lorenzo a casual intimacy he withheld from Niccolò. Instinctively, Niccolò knew. Deep down, he harbored something just as sinister, just as cruel, as Leandro did. That’s why watching Leandro with Lorenzo had, over time, become a bearable, if painful, constant on his internal map. But his interactions with Elias unsettled him, eroding the very foundations of his composure. Niccolò’s hands started trembling. He clenched them tightly, pressing his nails into his palms, to hide it.
Leandro kicked Elias’s desk hard. The oak groaned, shaking violently, almost toppling over. Elias jolted upright in alarm, his voice still unsteady. “F-forgive me, my lord.”
Leandro stood there, silently looking down at Elias’s tear-streaked face. Elias’s eyes glistened, on the verge of breaking. Yet, in that moment, Niccolò felt like he was the one who might burst into tears, a humiliating, unbidden weakness.
Leandro never made Elias run frivolous errands, but his gaze, sharp and predatory, never left the younger man. If Elias excused himself to the latrine during a break, Leandro would still be watching his retreating figure, even while conversing with the surrounding courtiers. Niccolò knew this because he never stopped watching Leandro, a fixed point in his own turbulent, unrequited world.
To be honest, Niccolò’s first impression of Elias had been unremarkable. His skin wasn’t the clearest, but his youthful features gave him a face that was easy enough to look upon. When he smiled, it felt genuinely open, and even his neutral expression carried a certain studious brightness. Before Leandro began his cruel game, no one harbored particular ill will towards Elias. He seemed a scholar who had grown up in a warm, if humble, environment. While he wasn’t overtly sociable, preferring to spend his time alone with scrolls and quills, there was no trace of worry or discomfort in his demeanor.
Most scholars thought of Elias as a decent, if somewhat isolated, fellow. Since he never flaunted the limited patronage he’d received, he earned a quiet respect. Humble, quiet, diligent, and inexplicably pleasant to be near—that was Niccolò’s initial, if uncharitable, assessment of Elias.
Niccolò hadn’t particularly liked him from the start. Nor had he hated him. He simply hadn’t cared. To say Elias wasn’t even on his radar, wasn’t a plotted point on his intricate maps, would be more accurate. Yet, whenever he spoke with Leandro or Lorenzo or their retinue, and Elias’s name arose, Niccolò would casually lie, saying, “Oh, him? He’s capable enough. A fine, if uninspired, scholar.”
Leandro, like Niccolò, hadn’t paid much attention to Elias at first. Leandro was never the type to care about the lower strata of the ducal academy. After Elias arrived in May, he and Leandro didn’t exchange a single word until June. That was how things had originally been, the expected course of things on Niccolò’s meticulously drawn social map.
But one day, something shifted. A small, sharp deviation formed in the mundane flow of events. It happened right after the mid-day meal, and looking back, Niccolò didn’t think he’d ever regretted an action as much as he regretted what happened then.
Elias, as usual, had taken a corner seat in the annex library, his nose buried in a weighty volume of ancient cosmology. He was the kind of scholar who loved losing himself in texts. On the other hand, Niccolò had a habit of being overly eager to demonstrate his intellect to anyone he deemed worthy of his notice.
That’s why, when he stumbled upon Elias by chance, Niccolò struck up a conversation about the obscure treatise he was reading. Niccolò was not a dedicated scholar of ancient texts himself—pretending to a breadth of knowledge was more his style. He meticulously mapped the intellectual landscape, charting others' achievements to navigate his own social ascent.
“You must truly relish these dusty tomes, yes?”
“Hmm? Oh, yes, I suppose.” At the time, Elias and Niccolò were still distant acquaintances. Perhaps that made the approach easier, less fraught with the usual social anxieties.
“Have you concluded that one?”
“Well, I’m near the final calculations.”
“Then close it now. The ending will disappoint you. It is one of those works where the grand conclusion unravels all that came before.”
“You have read it then?”
“Indeed, a while ago. I recall the futility of the final theorem.” To satisfy his intellectual vanity, Niccolò always sought out reviews and critiques of any significant work, ensuring he had something informed, or at least impressive-sounding, to offer in future conversations. Drawing on those memories, he offered a critique—not a real one, merely a sufficient one to sound learned—and Elias smiled brightly, looking genuinely pleased. It caught Niccolò off guard.
“You’re the first I’ve met who has read this, besides Master Alva himself.”
“Oh... truly?”
“Yes, but I shall still finish it. Discerning why the final calculation veered so astray is part of the joy, I think.”
“Well, of course. All minds chart their own paths.”
“Hearing you say that makes me anticipate it even more.”
That smile still lingered as an uncomfortable memory, a glitch in Niccolò’s memory palace. Was it some instinctive unease he felt back then? The small, bright flame of Elias’s innocent admiration. After that day, Elias started seeking out Niccolò more frequently, a quiet presence near his drafting table. Though Niccolò found it a bit annoying, and often wondered, *Why me?*, he didn’t outright reject him. Elias, with his diligent reputation, wasn’t the worst person to be associated with.
After all, outside of commissioned maps and political missives, deep scholarship was practically off-limits for most of Volterra’s aspiring nobles. Even if someone had the time, such weighty tomes were little more than glorified footstools. For Elias, Niccolò was probably the only person around who could even pretend to speak of such things.
That day was one of those routine encounters, but it also happened to be one of the most ill-fated days among them. Lorenzo Santini was to blame. To this day, Niccolò could not fathom why he had acted the way he did. Why he, a man who never meddled in others’ intellectual landscapes without a commission, chose to stick his nose where it didn’t belong. Why Lorenzo, of all things, had left his preliminary draft of a new maritime chart, marked with intricate calculations and compass roses, wide open for everyone passing by to see.
Niccolò, who guarded his own cartographic calculations with a zeal bordering on paranoia, naturally assumed Lorenzo wouldn’t want his exposed either. So, he flipped the parchment over to hide it. That’s when he saw it: the final, elegant solution to a navigational challenge that had stumped even Master Bellini. It was a brilliant, concise solution. He blinked in disbelief, his fingers tracing the delicate lines. It was definitely correct, an insight that would place Lorenzo’s work far beyond a mere amateur’s attempt.
It was the first time one of Niccolò’s preconceptions about Lorenzo was shattered. A small shock to realize Santini wasn’t merely a charismatic dilettante. Naturally, that made Niccolò think of Leandro’s intellectual pursuits. Now, *he* was the true wasteland. A noble who’d scrawl hasty, ill-conceived diagrams and pass them off as grand visions, Leandro had never once managed a respectable, original thought in the rigorous fields of cartography or engineering. Perhaps that’s why Niccolò felt such a mix of emotions—like he’d found a vein of pure silver in what he’d dismissed as common ore. A man he’d once merely tolerated for his proximity to Leandro now proved more substantial than the man he longed for. That strange realization must have thrown him off, because Niccolò did something he normally never would have done.
It wasn’t anything grand. He just grabbed a nearby stylus and scribbled a short note at the top of Lorenzo’s chart.
“*Consider the autumnal equinox’s tidal shifts for the northern currents. Your primary vector remains sound, but this refinement will yield an even greater precision. A masterful initial draft, Santini. – N. Moretti*
*P.S. Forgive me for scrutinizing your work without leave. I merely turned the parchment to preserve its privacy and happened upon your singular insight.”*
The arrogance of evaluating someone’s work and offering unsolicited, though technically brilliant, advice made Niccolò feel a prickle of embarrassment, so he rambled to justify himself. He couldn’t say why he even wrote it in the first place. At the time, he must have been out of his mind, his cartographer’s impulse for perfection overriding all social decorum. Looking back, it was clear this was the first mistake in what would become a series of entanglements. Every mess starts with a poorly fastened first button.
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