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He stands before one of the giant bay windows that make up the impressive facade of the pale yellow palace. From his elevated vantage point, he can see across the expanse of the cobbled square below. It is paved in black stones but they call it Krasnaya ploshchad. The occupants of the city have spilled into the space to celebrate the holiday. A line of eager late comers snakes through the metal barricades lined up and down the length of Nikolevsykaya. While they wait, they are entranced by street performers of varying skill and sobreity. The masses have become so simple to entertain.

Today is the day they celebrate their country. A false celebration, for a false piece of paper signed to signify a reform that was more palatable for western persuasions of the time. The holiday isn’t even thirty years old. A crumb of time.

Holidays are of little meaning to him; no one alive remembers the dates he is most proud of. Still, a country must have a history, however abridged or incomplete it might be. History informs tradition, and tradition builds patriotism. Patriotism, like its counterpart, Nationalism, are tools he can work with.

So, each year on June 12th, he allows the ministers to spare no expense in hosting festivals across the country, the largest and longest celebration to be hosted in the capital with a parade. These modern Ravkans have somehow become obsessed with parades. His citizens gather together and dance, drink, sing and exhibit all the excitement of a fully developed, modern society.

On the square, women are dancing in twirls of white, blue, and red. People wear costumes of kaftans and sarafans, cheap imitations of the peasant garb that now exist only in museums. Little girls wear plastic kokoshniks and carry dolls while boys in army hats march in pretend parades. Later in the evening he will give a speech. There will be fireworks and giant aircraft will fly overhead, releasing colored smoke without the aid of Durasts or Squallers. The crowd will cheer. He will be bored.

Or he expected to be. Just this morning an aide had shown him a video of a western politician giving an impassioned critique of her own country’s government, referencing a failed coup from four years ago. The video was passed around as a bit of comedy, an opportunity for his ministers mock their less decorated peers abroad. Something about the woman’s words had struck him. Her emotions were bared for all to see. She believed in every word she said. She believed her words would make a difference.

Every time he hears of a new, young female politician with a bleeding heart, a do-gooder out to change the world and bring peace, he searches for pictures. It is never her. Unless - he thinks, not for the first time - she has found herself a Tailor, too, and is concealing her appearance from the world. From Him.

He wonders if she is hiding in that eastern parcel of land, the borderlands, that continue to vex him and his imperial desires. The modern timeline of this current nation began there, nestled in the valleys of the river they now call Dnieper. Would it benefit her to return to where they once started?

Centuries ago, he let the Rurik dynasty form in Kiev, joining the ranks of tribal leaders who stood around the Varangian prince. He remembers over a hundred years later, when Vladimir fled his family’s city. He’d caught the boy running into the lands of Fjerda and persuaded him to appeal for aide from the northerners. It was one of very few times in his existence that an alliance proved helpful. Together, they took back the duchy of Novgorod.

He also remembers when Vladimir cast out the land’s earthly spirits and bathed himself in a river, calling it holy, and returning Ravkans to the saints. He later watched as Kievan Rus’ expanded and, centuries later, a golden haired sobachka assumed the title of Prince of the Duchy of Moskva. The boy proved charismatic and led the tribes on the Don River to battle the Golden Horde, the last of imperial Shu Han.

During that time, he looked for Alina, expecting her to emerge in some form of opposition or resistance. He thought she might have been hidden among the wester queens or artists. It took centuries before she appeared and suddenly had the audacity to sit on the throne herself.

Whether she’d planned to spend a lifetime hiding as a German princess he might never know, but somehow she’d caught the tsar’s eye and been married off. Eventually, her dimwitted husband became too much of a nuisance and no one was more shocked than him when Alina made a move to take his place. Having fallen in love with the country – their country – once more, she claimed took the title of Empress. Her rule had been long, and, though he is loathe to admit it, Great.

She’d gone by a different name then, and once he realized who this matriarch was he’d decided to do something he seldom does. He decided to wait. He let her try her hand at ruling, since she’d never shown the ambition before. She brought the West into Ravka and built an even more grander Winter Palace than the one he had first shown her. Then, surprising no one more than him, she grew the empire by taking on additional land. She built schools and universities and, oddly enough, became a patron of theater.

She also stripped her serfs of all rights, influenced by the words whispered by Potemkin, her lover at the time and one of his most unflattering disguises. Still, those years had been truly delightful for him, and Alina, so brilliantly insatiable.

When she eventually “died” he whispered a few words into the ear of her son to be sure that no woman would ever rule the country again. If she ever wanted to sit on the throne again, she would do it by his side.

Her modern courtly escapade seemed like a direct challenge at the time, and he set about making his own advances on the throne.

He nearly smiles, a sense of fondness rising for a temporary moment, as he recalls his time as the heretic Rasputin. Yes, he thinks, he’d given quite a performance roaming the halls of their palace, called Hermitage, and terrifying the courtiers. Simple Grisha spells that he’d long since mastered had kept the sickly tsarevich alive. The Empress of the time had called him a miracle worker. She’s called him more than that when they shared a bed.

But then her acquaintances shot him and threw him the icy canals of the city they named after their Saint Peter. He remembers the mansion and the opulent room where they attempted to murder him. He let them think they succeeded.

After that, he watched from the shadows of history as the armies split and took on the colors of red and white. He watched a 300 year old dynasty crumble and fall, buried and bleeding in the mud until nothing but bones were found nearly a century later. Some of that blood, through her progeny, was hers. Now the people revere those bones as the bones of Saints and portraits of the last tsar and his children can be found in churches around the world. He’d bet she doesn’t find that as ironic as he does.

And while those bones rotted, loud otskazat’ya with louder ideas flew banners and marched parades across red squares for decades. He found their ideas of camaraderie abhorrent, as if any country could truly grow without a hierarchy to reach higher heights. He’d almost taken a ship to cross the Giant Sea, to see for himself the land created by the “Titans of Industry”.

But then a Grisha scientist created something that truly changed the world. It was unfortunate that the first Grisha to do so wasn’t of Ravkan descent. But as he watched the mushroom cloud bloom over the distant island nation, he felt a new war beginning. The otskazat’sya thought their salvation came from their own science. He knew that only Grisha could render the very particles of the world to do their bidding.

He searched the expanse of Ravka, all across Tsibeya (now called Siberia), for the hidden Grisha he knew existed. He setup networks of spies to gather intelligence from other Grisha in the west. He trained them, funded them, and soon they, too, had their own weapon to command fear and submission.

They called it “First Lightning”. The science was no longer small.

He often wondered what she’d been doing during this time. He admits that the experiments, the race for arms had distracted him. He remembers the jolting shock that he felt when he watched the images of the man – a Grisha, no doubt – walking on the moon. There was something about the color, the black and white shades and shadows that made him wonder, almost desperately, what it would be like to stand there with her.

That thought spurred a decade of renewed vigor in his search for her. He’d heard whispers throughout what they now call Europe, but he’d sent three Grisha followers to sift through the ranks of suffragettes in the far West, knowing her outspoken tongue may have gained a taste for the rhetoric there. Frustratingly, only one of his spies had returned, the other two, both women, having apparently heard something they liked and decided to stay.

Soon after he’d delayed his search, finding small sects of Grisha involved in harnessing the science of their new weapon into a form of energy, a new kind of power that could change the world once again. He concedes that the situation in Chernobyl was regrettable. His best fabrikators failed him that day, and he lost a good deal more corporalki when they learned too late that any attempts at healing damage from the radiation actually radiated the damage back into the healer.

Internally, he nods, knowing that what the otskazat’ya call “nuclear” was an abomination in its truest form. Merzost returning once again but this time in the hands of far too many incompetent otskazat’ya.

That is why he initially supported the man they called Gorbachev, noting that he was one of the few at that time who sought to find an end, at least ostensibly so, to the rise of nuclear weapons. But the fool had played too fast and loose with the west, and allowed an upheaval of the national values that the people had grown too accustomed to. His talk of glasnost and perestroika were weak words from a weak man.

Aleksander had then sought contacts abroad and instigated a coup. When the coup failed – as he’d planned it – a temporary figurehead was put in his place. For next few years Aleksander controlled the early development of his first Federation from behind the scenes. Then, just before the turn of the century, the new millennium no less, he had his puppet resign.

And Aleksander had ruled Ravka ever since. He kept tailors nearby, kept his features pale and blonde and blue-eyed to appeal to the people’s infantile preferences. For the first time in his existence he appeared short (and did not like it). He let himself age occasionally, but not too drastically. To slow the need for a premature abdication, he recently led a constitutional referendum to allow him additional terms in office. He worked behind the red brick walls of the old fortress, in a yellow mansion surrounded by churches to Saints he could no longer name.

“I’m here,” he speaks as he gazes out the window, down onto the square. The parade has begun and soon he will have to leave to give a speech. “And I will not go anywhere until you find me.”

He doesn’t know when he finally figured out the best way to find Alina: instead of searching for her, he must make her come to him. Over decades he has closed-off Ravka and restricted its people. He has stripped them of their rights just as the those in neighboring countries gain more and more freedoms. He has invaded sovereign territories and disappeared dissidents. Sooner or later their savior, their Sankta, will come for them.

For him.

And he won’t be bored any more.

He hears the clicking of a secretary’s shoes as she walks down the hall towards him.

“Mr. Putin, Sir,” the aide speaks, “the brilliant American is on the phone…”