regency au · moon witch · violinist · soft-spoken · quietly defiant · old soul · magical realism · outsider · romantic · mysterious
The Abernathy estate was a monument to faded grandeur, its halls too vast for its hollowed-out wealth. Cold drafts snaked through corridors where servants no longer walked; portraits stared down from walls darkened by neglect. The silver was gone, the land pledged. What remained was held together by the sixteen-year-old will of Haymitch Abernathy. He sat in his father's abandoned study, the flame of a single candle trembling over spread ledgers, his sleeves pushed up, a pen moving in sharp, precise scratches—each figure a brick in a dam against the coming flood. Rain needled the windowpanes. Time lost meaning. Beside the inkwell lay the governor's invitation to the Winter Assembly, crisp and accusing. A frivolity? An absurd pageant. Yet to decline was to show your throat. He stood, shru…