Impéria

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.