=== Sixteen Years Prior to Present Day ===

Four boys and a young girl gathered in a small alcove within the lower borough, where flowers flourished and small grasses seemed to sprout out of the cracks in the stone paving. The girl, who had a head of sandy-blonde hair and sky-blue eyes extended her small hands, which held a silverish object that glimmered under the red morning sun.

“Is it really all right to accept this?” A boy asked with widened eyes. They were a stark greyish-blue, and his ruffled hair fell past his forehead in little curled brown wisps that made the gentle morning breeze seem a blessing.

“Lumi, Do you think we would have worked so hard to get it for you if we didn’t want you to take it happily?” Another boy smiled.

Lumière blinked his eyes once, and a beautiful image was painted before him. Elise Alinde, Ainsworth Benedict, and the two Hammond brothers- Artier and Letis knelt smiling before him. His eyes began to tear up, so he wiped the droplets away with his sleeve before accepting the silver object in Elise’s hands.

It was a simple pocket watch with a single engraving on its blank surface. Lumière looked up towards the group with an expression full of surprise.

“It says ‘Everything is okay’ because it really is,” Ainsworth spoke softly with a smile.

The boy with stark-white hair was a bit older than the rest of them, and as the son of the priest of the monastery on Cobbler’s street, he was representative of a leader figure to them.

Letis reached his hand around Lumière’s head, pulling him in close as he placed his forehead on Lumière’s with a smile.

“You’ll never have to go to that place again,” Letis smiled.

“I’ll never have to return home, truly?”

“Truly,” Elise replied, sitting beside Lumière as she looked down at him gently. “Your mother can do nothing to you as long as you’re with us.”

For a long time, she had admired the boy who would play by the grassy hillside of Cobbler’s street in the spring, in the creek that cut through the lower borough in the summer, crush the leaves under his feet in autumn, and fear returning home in the winter.

His mother was always waiting there. She didn’t really care where Lumière was at any moment, but when he would take a single step into her home, it was as if he was an intruder. He wondered often if she forgot that she even had a son at all.

So he spent all of his time outside, often with the children of the monastery, and the two sons of the shop on a lonely street of the lower borough. Mrs. Hammond and the Priest at the monastery were happy on most days to take him in, as long as he was willing to help out with trivial matters. On quiet and unbusied days, Artier, Letis, and the children of the monastery would all spend their time with him, and because of that, he never felt an ache for a sense of family at all.

On his birthday especially, he was treated by them as if he were a prince who deserved to own the world.

“We’ve got one more surprise for you, Lumière,” Ainsworth said, humorously gesturing towards the staircase they often used to make their way into the middle borough. “The festival’s today, after all…”

The middle borough was unlike the high borough, where one without a sense of majesty to them was socially disavowed from entering. Rather, while there was some fantastical fanciful sense of wonder within the citizens of the middle borough, it was also a place where industrialisation first bloomed; it was filled with a multitude of people who had either come seeking fortune- or to spend theirs.

As such, a few children weren’t so out of place as long as they were sure to wear thick white clothing over their heads like cloaks. The cloaks allowed them to avoid the gazes of the Peace Keepers draped in white, who saw them as dissidents of the ‘order’ they loved to keep. So, with linens as white as clouds draped over themselves, they began walking up a staircase splitting through the buildings of the lower borough.

There were dozens of bright multi-coloured flowers blossoming out of the lines in the paved stone steps, and a canopy of emerald leaves cast the pathway in dancing shadows. The wind would then brush by, creating cracks in the leafy ceiling for the sun’s rays to peer through.

There were potted fern plants scattered about the roadside, soaking up the remnant puddles of rainfall. In an age where only rain and bits of sun were a constant, it was obvious that flora would flourish. There were the flowers that would sprout from the paved roads and the vines that would blanket the sides of buildings. But there were also the boundless canopies of trees and shrubs that lined the roadsides.

Leiden was sometimes, although not as often as ‘land of bastard children and home of misery’, referred to as the ‘city-state of butterflies’. How couldn’t it be true? In a city full of flowers, there were sure to be more bugs than people.

Lumière wondered often if that meant the city belonged more to the insects than it did the humans. It was a laughable thought to him, although his lungs had been frozen by the cold air, so even a slight chuckle would send him into a coughing fit. Not a bit of pain was worth a laughing matter to him, so he kept a straight and quiet expression.

In the brush at the wayside, the leaves began to rustle slightly, and a white-glowing rabbit ran past at intense speeds, almost bouncing in midair with its bounding hops as it disappeared from Lumière’s sight. It seemed almost as excited as them to arrive within the middle borough. He looked over towards the children beside him to see if they too had spotted the creature, but they simply looked on ahead as if nothing had happened.

He then looked over towards Elise as they stepped up the stone steps leading up to the middle borough. She noticed his shifting gaze, and still looking ahead with a smile, reached out her hand in offerance towards him. Lumière kept walking forward as his eyes widened slightly, but he took her hand in his; his heart began to warm slightly.

He didn’t say anything, and neither did she, but they both smiled gradually as they came to the edge of the staircase.

To any adult, perhaps the world was filled with madness. But children were blind, and so the sun was beautiful in the morning time. As the group stared at the wonderment of the middle borough, for what could have been the hundredth time in their life, making it no more than a trivial thing; they felt their hearts ache with euphoria.

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Besides the flowers and the sprawling stone structures, there were hundreds of brick chimneys spilling smoke into the air. Each house dotting the streets in long lines had polished glass windows, either displaying various wares and regalia- or showing off the quaint and peaceful lives of those who lived in the middle borough.

Usually, those who could afford to live in or outside of the shopping district were those who worked stable managerial jobs at banks or owned medium-sized businesses. They were those who enjoyed modest comfort and showed off the splendour of their lifestyles to cope with a darker reality.

To the group of children, however, the men and women who dressed in fine suits and dresses were like rulers of the land with countless retained wealth in their pockets. They were those that paraded around in fanciful rented carriages pulled by horses, or by the new automobiles that were driven by bouts of expelled steam.

Although, they had no mind to sit and stare at the crowds of the shopping district. Just a short walk down the street, the hooded children came to the festival district, where a large bountiful crowd of hundreds had gathered. Those from the high borough had tactfully avoided the festival, so it was mostly filled with those of the middle borough, and of a few lower-class families who had managed to save enough to avoid working on that day and enjoy themselves.

As the children walked through the bustling and busied streets of the middle borough, they took in the sights.

There were bright red, yellow, and blue balloons hanging from metal railings on the roadside, from branches in the bright blossoming trees, and from the electric lamplights that had just been installed along the edge of the stone-paved streets. It was a common day for a parade, an event which happened often in the festival district, and so the entirety of that sector of the middle borough was heavily decorated with festivities.

The city-state of Leiden was not just famous for the multi-coloured flowers that grew out of its stone, or its factories, or its flowing rivers, or even its incredibly illicit ‘entertainment district’. Its festivals were its genuine spotlight feature, and the carnival that had settled in the heart of the festival district was its forefront showcase.

Children gathered around food carts that let out billows of steam from boiling and frying meats, bread, and vegetables. Fresh fruits were sold from wagons parked at the wayside, and other produce was abundant. The springtime was the prized time of year in the century of downpour they had been born into. With trickles of sunshine and intense rainfall, the produce from the farming districts outside of Leiden was harvested in intense abundance. While the middle and high boroughs benefited the most from this, it was the one time of year when the remains were able to trickle down into the lower borough. It was the one time of the year when the sweetness of fruit was able to cross a Dwindler child’s lips. As long as they made their way up the flowering steps, or shrouded themselves and wandered through the gate to the middle borough, they would be able to grab the delicious treat that would be foreign to them otherwise.

It was the one time of year when everyone could have been said to be at least somewhat ‘happy’. At least, the hooded children that walked through the streets couldn’t abandon their bright smiles.

As they moved past the parades and cheering crowds, Letis and Artier noticed the small boy and girl next to them holding hands, and so they began to tease the two.

“You two should just marry already, shouldn’t you?” Letis chided as he bumped into Lumière’s shoulder gently.

Lumière recoiled from the contact and let out an exasperated laugh, which made his chilled lungs sting slightly.

“She wants to be a servant of the Veridian Star.” Lumière shook his head in puzzlement. “Doesn’t that make one unfit to wed?”

“Perhaps she only wants to serve the Goddess in the absence of you,” Artier responded, winking in passing.

As he met Elise’s reddened face which seemed slightly embarrassed and a bit angered, Artier quickly averted his gaze and kept walking as if nothing had happened with a satisfied devilish smile on his face.

“Oh, shut it.” Elise shook her head disapprovingly as she also averted her gaze, mostly away from Lumière, still holding his hand gently as they walked.

Lumière thought as they walked, seemingly lost in his thoughts before he looked over at Elise once more.

“Will you really become a patron servant of the church?” Lumière asked of her.

Elise glanced around furtively before letting out a deep sigh.

“Perhaps.”

Her response was short and full of annoyance, but when speaking with Lumière, her tone and her gaze seemed to soften just a little bit. She had been the first to call him by the nickname that everyone had adopted. She had been the first to suggest taking him in, and soon he would be informally adopted as a servant of the church under the Priest, Benedict.

“Then, what will you be when you grow up, Lumi?” She asked of him.

Before he could answer, however, they came upon a great spectacle on the corner of the stone-paved street- 'Orulinde Street'. Dozens of spectators had gathered around a singular man who stood high above them, with his hand outstretched, a dancing flame resting in his palm.

He stood on a platform made up of wood and recycled milk crates painted a stark black. He had a half-top hat of the same midnight colour with a bright white stripe along the top of its rim.

“Come one, come all, to see the great ‘illusionist’ perform! He hath no grand stage, nor splendour as a backdrop, and that is all so that his magic dazzles the crowd further!” A man shouted out from beside him. It was seemingly his assistant.

The magician standing on the stage seemed oddly familiar, but at the same time, Lumière couldn’t seem to make out a single detail on the man’s face. The group of cloaked children stopped to watch for a short time, and the magician seemed to catch Lumière’s gaze out of many.

The flame dancing in the magician’s hand suddenly burst up high into the air, revealing a bright red rose amidst smoke. As the crowd watched on, the magician danced about on the stage, an endless flow of bright performance that matched with the wind that blew quietly past the spectacle. His smile was intensely warm- as if it was bathing the onlookers in bright rays of sunshine that made them feel at ease. They watched on as he held the rose high into the air, pulling the top hat off of his head and flipping it upside down.

Then, with obvious gestures that turned the focus towards the flower, he lifted it slowly down into the hat, only for it to be quickly snatched away from his hand. His face didn’t hold any hints of surprise or shock, however. That same smile beamed from his expression before he turned the hat towards the audience. There was seemingly nothing inside of it; not a flower nor beast to snatch it away rested inside the top hat.

There was some sort of heavy shock within the faces of the crowd. They knew that the concept of ‘magic’ was frequent within their reality, of blessings of gods and devils alike. Although, since that otherworldly concept rested in the hands of secretive factions of the orthodox churches, they had never for a moment thought that they would see such a thing with their own eyes. Although he was just an illusionist, to them, it seemed just as real as any miracle. His warm smile made it seem almost so. So, they did not fear it as most would.

The magician took out a thick and heavy dark-brown leather-bound book from the hat before showing it off to the crowd, before dropping it back into the hat. He dropped it back into the hat, but there was no audible sound.

Reaching back into his extended top hat, the magician’s hand seemed to delve farther into it than physically possible. Before long, he had leaned over completely, his shoulder passing past the rim of the hat as he fished around in its abyss-like depths. The crowd around Lumière began to erupt with exasperated and unbelievable praises and astonished gasps, but Lumière’s eyes were trained hard on the man himself- as if his heart had been grasped tightly by the performance; his entire view of the world narrowed to him as the only member of the audience, and the magician who acted as the performer on the makeshift stage.

Suddenly, the magician retracted his hand. In his gloved grasp, he held a white-glowing rabbit that sent Lumière’s mind alight with thoughts. Hadn’t he seen such a thing before?

Was that all just part of the trick? It amazed Lumière. He had never known such a thing could be so flashy, so interesting. And as he looked around at the crowd, he could see that they were just as amazed. They had been enthralled by the lone magician and his performance.

Suddenly, Lumière knew the answer he had to Elise’s previous question.

He wanted to be like the magician who stood on the small stage in front of a handful of people as an audience, bathing them with a warm smile.