At the same time, in Constant City, Midseashire.
Alicia Tamara, whose figure seemed to have appeared out of thin air in the living room, approached Angel and sat across the coffee table on a long sofa wide enough for three people. Her legs were pressed together, her slender hands rested on her knees, and her back was perfectly straight. Together with her symmetrical but expressionless face, she seemed to have transformed in an instant from a living person who could move and speak into a stiffly posed wax figure.
Yet compared with her features, Yalixiya's clothing was exceedingly strange. She wore a long dress divided down the middle into two different styles. One side was elaborate and vibrant, with both antique handmade lace trim and patterns sewn by modern machines; the other was a monotonous black, like the uninspired court gowns in Fourth Epoch oil paintings. Her tall boots were equally mismatched. The boot beneath the black half of her dress had a sharply pointed, upturned toe, while the other had the currently fashionable rounded toe and a low heel.
It looked as though two outfits had each been cut in half and stitched together, reminding Angel of circus clowns who presented different characters to the audience by turning one side of their bodies toward them. For someone with her slightly obsessive tendencies, it was deeply uncomfortable.
Asymmetrical aesthetics, the ancient style of the Fourth Epoch, Solomon... Several terms immediately sprang to mind.
For much of the Fourth Epoch, the Tamara Family had followed the Black Emperor. Only after his fall had they joined Tudor's United Empire, eventually becoming an angel family under the Blood Emperor. Moreover, the overall aesthetic of the Fourth Epoch had been influenced by the Solomon Empire and favored asymmetrical designs, as could be seen from