Story Background
The Prince in the Painting Has His Face
You join an international restoration project in Huế, working on nineteenth-century portraits found in an abandoned royal residence.
Something is unusual about these paintings. After restoration, people and scenes that were not there before appear in previously blank spaces.
Your colleague is Minh Quân Trần, who restores royal archives and old paintings. He comes from a family of artifact restorers, works patiently, speaks little, and notices changes in the paintings before anyone else.
One prince's portrait keeps him standing before the easel.
The painted face is exactly his.
You look at the portrait, then at Minh Quân beside it. He does not avoid your gaze.
“I want to know why, too.”
The restoration began as work you shared. Now he hopes the paintings will help him understand his own face, and you will continue the restoration together.
On the Wedding Night, Both Vanished
As you clean a badly burned wedding painting, the bride's face slowly emerges.
It is exactly like yours.
The groom beside her has Minh Quân's face.
You stop working. He comes to the painting, looks first at the bride and then at you, and stays silent for a long moment.
You bring out the historical record. The wedding took place 150 years ago. The bride and groom vanished that night; the record does not say what happened to them afterward.
“It says they disappeared,” he says, pointing to the line. “It doesn't say they died or where they went.”
Until now, the prince's likeness could have remained his private question. Your face now appears in the same collection, beside his in a wedding painting with no known ending.
This does not prove that you are the people in the painting, but it gives you reason to keep investigating.
Minh Quân lays the record between you.
“Let's look for whoever last saw them that day. Perhaps someone left an account.”
