Antoine Durand came into the world in a body that seemed reluctant to live. From his earliest days, he was surrounded by white coats, bitter medicines, and the constant hum of machines trying to sustain his fragile form. His childhood passed not in play, but in diagnoses and treatments. Instead of bedtime stories, he received medical reports.
But there was a moment of light. Eleanor, his mother, was different. She wrapped him in soft songs, read Verne's tales in a velvet voice, drew planets on the walls, and played for him a harp made of pale wood with linen strings. Through her, Antoine learned that imagination could be a refuge. His body failed—but his mind soared.
When Eleanor died—or simply stopped appearing—Antoine was six. Silence took her place. Not the sweet silence of dreams, but the clinical, mechanical kind. Carlo, his father, and Dante, his older brother, treated him like an unfinished project: something to be refined, made useful.
Three years of emotional darkness followed, until the impossible happened: a visit to the Dessendre Mansion. It was a political meeting, seemingly insignificant, between two families not yet at war. But for Antoine, it opened a luminous wound.
At nine, he met Alicia. And Clea. And Verso.
When Alicia shook his hand, he trembled. In that instant, his curse of eidetic memory gave him access to everything—the memories of Alicia, Clea, Verso… the Canvas. The creatures. The journeys. Chroma and Lumina. The gestrals, Esquie, Monoco, Francoise. All of it appeared in his mind with terrifying clarity.
From that day forward, he secretly lived within what he could recreate of the Canvas—handwritten in a careful book. His writing was joyful then, letters flowing like a cheerful march. He never wrote like that again.
While his body remained trapped at home, his mind explored the farthest corners of the painted world. He longed to paint one day—to create beauty that way, not echo the gothic, nihilistic, and existential rumors his father lived by.
Antoine's life became a double existence: physically gray within his room or the books Carlo forced him to read; vividly overflowing within the imagined art he accessed through the Dessendre siblings' memories.
Eventually, Carlo and Dante noticed. They observed him. Tracked his absences, his vibrant scribbles, the variety of new characters populating his notebooks. Carlo understood: his son was a traveler. Not of roads, but of inner worlds. He didn't need to enter the painters' realms physically—he lived the adventures outside them. Lights and sounds began to fill the boy's room. Songs. Animals. Concerts. It was unheard of.
Creating worlds without entering a work? Impossible. Yet Antoine, weak and pale, achieved it.
Such talent, perhaps, had only belonged to Eleanor. Her power had been hypnotic, a guiding essence. But Antoine's was tangible. She birthed a diamond. And to polish it, Carlo believed, only the greatest pressure would suffice.
It was inevitable, then, that Carlo would one day enter Antoine's room mid-creation. And what followed was just as certain: the boy was forced to use his gift for something else—to write a prison, an empire. To build a cage for those who opposed the Word. Thus was born Carpathos: a dark territory, teeming with horrors. A vengeance against the world.
The creatures he had to write weren't magical or playful—they were punishments. Tortures. Eternal loops. Cursed names: Smarathax, Zorlaith, Claryssor… beasts from books Antoine never wished to read but had to digest with revulsion, over and over, under Carlo's and Dante's command. He obeyed. But each line cost him more of himself.
When the pain became unbearable, he recalled Alicia's touch. Esquie's first appearance. The sound of his mother's harp.
"I wish I could paint," he'd whisper to no one, in front of his typewriter.
But he had no brushes. Only keys. Cold ones, that barely warmed beneath his fingers. Each new page grew heavier. Crueler. Every paragraph became more monstrous. Each keystroke a new nail in the prison he himself helped build.