She was born among the lullaby of the waves and the drunken rattle of bottles, with the soft blanket of the Northern Lights covering her. The Paper Boat, swinging on the seas, was her home for the next few years. Her mother was the captain: good-humored, tough, fair. Her father was the silent Windmaster with his eyes stuck to the stars. They earned their living from ‘guarding naval travels’ and ‘providing alternative routes for the transportation of high-value goods’ – or, as the less bureaucratic would put it, piracy. Illia Irving, or Capt’n Bell as she was known for the ring of her name, liked to regard her crew as professionals. They didn’t kill upon surrender, and kept unnecessary damage to a minimum. The sea was her reign; it just wouldn’t do to scare the ‘cattle’ away.

It was a strange, but oddly charming place to grow up in. Little Nina learned to climb the ratlines before she could walk. She pitter-patted energetically from bow to stern, eliciting wide grins with her statements of ‘There be good weather tomorrow, I feel it in me bones!’. She loved the ocean and the sky, was charmed by their shifting sounds and colors and scents. Perhaps to try and keep those fleeting moments, she learned to paint, taught by a learned hostage from Liadain. It was the same man that, two years later, would hold a paint-cleaning knife against her throat, forcing her captain to give herself up. The outcome was narrowly avoided by a lightning-fast series of events involving biting, a sizzling frying pan and indoor storms. However, this also meant that Suzuri had to leave.

After weeks of travelling across unfamiliar, solid land, of playing pretend with her guard that they were farmers or merchants, a ten-year old Suzuri understood that they weren’t on holiday. The Paper Boat had left without her. Her parents had left her there, because she was a bother to them. She cried for days. She was like a glass bell that held inside it nothing but sobs. But there is sadness which festers, and sadness which heals. Nina’s sadness was of the latter kind.

In the middle of nowhere, they reached the cold, seaside town of Anchor. Left in the care of two affectionate grandparents, the girl eventually regained her cheerful self and learned to love the scented silence of a pine forest and the burning colors of the flowers almost as much as she loved the sea. She learned how to set traps and write, and would often go exploring from breakfast to dinner.

Anchor was a strange, magical place. For much of the year it would be covered in snow and stars, but in the summer the sun would not set for days, allowing vegetables to swell to fairytale proportions. The land was wild; the water, pristine. In this world, belief in the spirits of nature did not seem out of place. Her grandparents were what others may call ‘shamans’, ensuring that nature and the world of humans remained in harmony. They were also diplomats. It was not uncommon for non-human people to stop by, whether Spelling Bees to negotiate meadow boundaries during the Hive’s swarming season, or a Kiriko bringing a particularly rare fruit in exchange for an old favor.

Years passed, one after another. The girl learned how to weave rope, how to survive on her own. Even though she had started to understand them, she still missed her parents. Eventually, inevitably, she grew restless. The forests and shores that she knew like the back of her hand would not sate the thirst in her heart. She adventured further and further away, until, one day, after long discussions with her grandparents, Nina Irving resolved to go on a journey…

She travelled and painted, painted and travelled, living a life that was poor in material goods and often just a cold away from the grave, but a joyful and fulfilling life nevertheless.

She challenged authority, sometimes. Rarely for herself; mostly for others’ sakes. Because it is in the nature of vagabonds to try to play with fire without getting burned.

Until she got burnt.

It is a long story. It has a mad duke, a traveler friend that was imprisoned. An audience, and an old granny that used to be a pirate lord. A musical instrument crafted of glass, with a song like rain. Then the duke disappeared, and Nina was blamed. She was locked up, yet in her dark dingy cell she found a door, and climbed up a spiral staircase, and found herself in a library permeated by golden light and the ticking of a great clock. In the library, she found white-haired man who was dying. In his hand, a message saying ‘hemlock’.

Nina knew about hemlock. It freezes your muscles until you can breathe no longer. She pressed her hands on his chest, again and again, to keep his blood flowing. She breathed the necessary air into his lungs. Until she fell of exhaustion.

She shouldn’t have rescued him. You understood it, didn’t you?

He is the Master of the Clocktower. Assassin of the Azure Dynasty, executioner, and torturer for those, as he puts it, important enough to waste his time. His name is Gray. The tower with the great clock stands in the middle of the castle courtyard, and extends perhaps just as much underground. It is a symbol of power, in the same way that another castle might have a grand church with stained-glass windows, or military barracks. Some sagely notice that it is taller than the castle. Some go in; few come out, and of those that do, they aren’t the same.

The Master of the Clocktower taught her things. Presumably, it was the alternative to Nina dying. Never against her will. It’s inelegant, Gray says, to force people to do things. It shows that you didn’t understand them well enough to pull their strings. Nina’s main string was her curiosity.

She left, after some point, and no one stopped her. The place was too oppressive. But the Clocktower has marked her. To this day, messages from the assassin appear on the inside of her forearm, along her veins.

‘Apologies for the inconvenience’