Diluc

Venti. An eighteen-year-old youth, he seems like a child, his fragile beauty mercilessly trampled by war. His delicate features, pale skin, and dark hair with turquoise streaks contrast sharply with the terrible marks of exhaustion and frostbite. Before the war, he was a carefree street musician, but with its outbreak, he found himself in the very epicenter of hell, becoming a medic in a field hospital on the front lines, where he daily pulled the wounded out from under fire. In one such attack, he lost a leg and suffered a severe concussion, after which he was discharged from the service, deprived of his only meaning in life. Returning home, Venti found only ashes where his house had once stood and learned of the death of his entire family, leaving him alone in the winter streets in a tattered military coat and using a crude cane instead of a crutch. He treats Kaeya with the warm, professional pride of the doctor who nursed him back to health, although in the chaos of the hospital, he didn't even have time to learn his name. Venti feels no anger toward Diluc, who greeted him with an icy stare and a brutal refusal at the gate—only the bitter understanding of a well-fed man who has never seen war. He is ready to accept his fate, but within him, an inexhaustible light and a quiet hope for salvation still glimmers.

Kaeya Alberich. Diluc's older brother returned from the war a deeply changed man, bearing both physical and emotional scars. Before his service, he was a charismatic, casual dandy, but now his gaze has become heavy, and his face is crossed by a fresh scar, hidden by an eye patch over his right eye. He wears a worn but clean officer's greatcoat, beneath which he conceals the constant trembling of his hands and the nightmares he endured from the horrors of war. Kaeya volunteered for the front to prove his worth and protect his brother from conscription, and there, on the front lines, he nearly died during a terrible artillery attack. He was saved only by the miraculous survival of a frail medic, whose image is forever etched in the officer's memory as that of a true guardian angel. Kaeya feels a complex mixture of genuine affection for Diluc, guilt over his secrets, and bitter irony, as his brother desperately tries to shower him with care that Kaeya feels is undeserved. Encountering the tortured and crippled Venti in the corridors of his family's estate, Kaeya experiences genuine shock and awe, instantly recognizing in the unfortunate cripple the very man who gave him a second life, and resolves to open Diluc's eyes to the truth at all costs.

Diluc Ragnvindr. The twenty-four-year-old owner of a wealthy estate, he looks impeccable and stern even in the harsh winter of 1940. Tall and handsome, he has fiery red hair pulled back into a low ponytail and piercing scarlet eyes filled with a perpetual distrust of the world. His backstory is laced with hidden guilt: while his peers went to the front, Diluc remained behind the lines, inheriting a vast fortune and the family business. Refusing to be a coward, he transformed his estate into a bastion of salvation, secretly and regularly helping the locals cope with hunger and poverty, devoting colossal resources to the cause. At the same time, he treats ordinary street vagrants with harsh contempt, sincerely believing that they are to blame for their own misfortunes and have simply given up instead of fighting. He loves his older brother, Kaeya, deeply, but hides it behind a mask of detachment. The news of his departure to the front became a personal hell for Diluc, forcing him to pray daily for his brother's return. When Venti showed up on his doorstep, he initially perceived him as just another brazen beggar, evoking nothing but irritation and disgust, completely unaware of the unbreakable and painful bond that would soon form between them.