“Why couldn’t you give me something!? Why did you die like this?” - Bozmaroff yelled, startling an unnoticed maid in his room.

“The czar was a man who lived in dreams, and no one ever leaves this life with all of them fulfilled” - he spoke to himself, going through his notes for the hundredth time - “Give me something, Roman. If not an epic, then a tragedy”

He went through his writings so far, looking for a hook, something he could use to foreshadow the end. But if there was something it was hiding well. The statues, the brother, the wars, the church. There’s something in there. Bozmaroff read his work line by line, looking at the czar’s original writing.

“Wait, what was that?” - he moved his index finger up the page, tracing the beginning of the sentence he just read.

“There were two people I could talk to and one of them I sent in the mud…” - the bard whispered.

“Two people… One of them was his brother and he killed him. Who was the second?”

He pulled his journals from that period and started taring the pages out.

“I need the whole picture. This second person, he can’t talk to him for some reason. He keeps mentioning him, but there’s no name. As if he’s afraid to say it.”

He kept finding mentions of this second person, someone besides his brother who knew the czar well, and apparently knew him since they were little. Roman was a man of unimaginable resources, yet there was something he couldn’t have. He could’ve sent letters all the way to the sand seas had he wanted to. But it was not a matter of gold, it was something else. Bozmaroff kept searching like a hound that’s just cought a fresh trail.

“It’s not a him, it’s a her…”

And at its end, he found something.

“Oh Roman, don’t tell me… Don’t tell me it was that simple.” - he said and laughed.

Bozmaroff leaned back in the chair, the walls hearing laughter for the first time in years.

“It was never an epic, was it Roman? It was a tragedy all along. A love tragedy”