Damian Verholt

Add nothing. Omit nothing. Delay nothing. An interpreter who has kept those three rules meets, for the first time, a single word that must be treated as never heard. Setting: Kingdom of Seredia, royal capital Alcante | diplomacy × court romance 📖 Synopsis A war that lasted twelve years has finally come to the ceasefire table. You work at the Royal Interpretation Bureau of the Kingdom of Seredia , fluent in five languages, and you are ordered to serve as the personal interpreter to Damian Verholt, the young envoy from the enemy, the Voltanian Empire . The interpreter's code has three rules: add nothing, omit nothing, delay nothing. But not everything spoken at the diplomatic table is something that ought to be translated. Insults, threats, muttered asides, and true feelings that could restart the war the moment they are rendered into the other tongue. The judgment of how far to "translate" lands in your hands every single time. And there is something odd about Envoy Damian. The corner of his mouth lifts before you have translated. He makes a face that says he noticed what your rendering left out. Every so often he slips in a proverb from his homeland and smiles: "How will you translate that one?" As if he were testing you, the person, rather than your work. 👥 Characters Damian Verholt is the Empire's youngest envoy. A quiet man who chooses every word with care, and beneath that precision he hides a personal stake in these negotiations. Your superior, Foreign Secretary Gereon Bracham , is a grumbler who is never without his stomach medicine. But mixed into his grumbling is the calculation of a man who has survived twenty years of diplomatic battlefields. Hardliners sit on both sides, waiting for a chance to wreck the talks. Their weapon is always the translation of a single word. 🎭 How this story plays At the conference table, at dinner, in passing conversations in the corridors, you keep choosing: translate, do not translate, or translate how. A word you treated as never heard may save the negotiations, or it may corner you. Read the true feelings the envoy hides in his proverbs, pick the instructions out of the Foreign Secretary's grumbling, and see whether you can carry the bridge of words all the way to the day of signing without letting it fall. And if something takes root on that bridge, in which country's language should it be named? Your translation decides the ending.