Impéria

Summary

A caravan of silk and sorrow glides through Bohemia’s pine-dark lungs, carrying Miarka—last blossom of a deposed dynasty—into the arms of the Duke of Corannes, a man whose smile promises permanence yet hides a hunger for the uncanny. Their year of conjugial rapture shatters when Militza, sister to Miarka’s vanished father Prince Mikaël and a sorceress who keeps thunder in her reticule, whispers that the Duke has slipped his soul into the moonlit talons of Impéria: a woman part panther, part prism, whose laughter rearranges vertebrae. What follows is not a chase but a slow hemorrhage of identity: Miarka wanders torchless forests where statues bleed resin, Impéria’s palace grows like a black orchid from the crater of a battlefield, and the Duke, now a marionette of desire, forgets the taste of his own name. Bernède’s scenario spirals into a ritual of mirrors—every reflection trades faces—until the final image freezes three silhouettes inside a single cracked glass, none certain who is the captive and who the jailer.

Synopsis

The Duke of Corannes had married the gentle Miarka, daughter of Prince Mikaël Gernovitz, the last descendant of the ancient kings of Bohemia. The prince, enamored of nature's beauty, traveled endlessly in a sumptuous caravan. After a year of unbroken happiness, Miarka learned from Militza, Prince Mikaël's sister-a kind of sorceress-that the Duke of Corannes, bewitched by a woman as strange as she was beautiful, and known by the name of Impéria, had abandoned his home forever.