Stockholm's summer air was a mockery. Cool, crisp, alive with birdsong. As if the world itself hadn't just witnessed the sun descend in three poisoned crowns over Japan.
In the marble halls of the Royal Palace, courtiers in Swedish blue and gold moved like silent wraiths, their faces carefully neutral. They kept their eyes lowered; out of respect, or fear of what might be read there.
For the Emperor of Japan had come to Sweden, not as a peer, but as a man burdened by ash and uncounted graves.
Yoshihito's robes were black, the crests of his house embroidered not in gold but in subdued iron thread.
His skin was drawn tight across sharp bones; since ascending after the sudden collapse of the Taishō line mid-war, he had been the sovereign of a realm already half-consumed by the dogs of famine and foreign ambition.
Now he was emperor of a nation that had seen its cities unmade in the span of a breath.
