Snow, Flames, and ... (1)

Camped in a crumbling farmhouse as snow keeps falling, Farnese and Serpico huddle by a small fire that barely holds off the cold. Serpico has come to enjoy moving without an army trailing behind them, while Farnese, hungry and half-frozen, finds little to like. When he offers to turn back toward the holy city, she flatly refuses, unwilling to abandon the search for the Black Swordsman or to set foot again in the mansion overlooking the square where heretics once burned. Serpico stays posted at the ruin's edge to watch for Kushan raiders rather than warm himself, and the quiet sends his thoughts far into the past.

He recalls a childhood of poverty in the God-ruled city, where he lived in a hovel with a sickly, bedridden mother who insisted he carry himself like the aristocrat his absent noble father supposedly was. Older boys routinely beat him and stole the food rations he collected, until one day he cracked their ringleader's skull open with a brick to keep his own. His mother handed him a locket picturing the three of them, meant one day to prove his noble parentage.

Revenge came when the bandaged boy returned with his older brother and left Serpico nearly dead in the snow, where he lay long enough to be almost buried. A passing noblewoman, Farnese, ordered her servants to carry him home and then insisted on nursing him herself, extracting a vow of lifelong service as the price of his rescue.

Serpico turns out to have been taken in by the Vandimion family, whose fortune rivals entire nations. He becomes a companion and plaything for Farnese, a lonely girl whose distant parents show affection only through gifts. During a storm she flees the mansion in terror, then dances freely in the rain, and Serpico glimpses a wholly different person beneath her fear. He also learns of the crematorium she keeps in the woods behind the estate, where she burns anything her faith condemns.

The episode's darkest thread arrives when the family patriarch, Federico III, examines Serpico's locket and recognizes it. Serpico realizes the man is his own father as well as Farnese's, making the two of them secret half-siblings. In exchange for guarding the secret, Serpico is granted noble standing, though his father coldly refuses to ever visit his ailing mother.

Chapter 185 belongs to the Millennium Falcon Arc and runs twenty-two pages, first printed in Young Animal issue 06 on March 9, 2001. It opens a two-part origin story for Serpico, with Farnese and their shared father Federico III appearing in flashback. The recurring motif of fire beside snow ties the frame story to the memories it triggers.