Chapter Two: The Girl Who No Longer Smiled
"Every artist needs a canvas,
and every canvas deserves a touch of pain."
— From the memoirs of Edgar Wilmore
The night was quieter than safe.
The fog clung to the ground like a wet shawl, suffocating sounds and swallowing footsteps.
In one of the narrow alleys behind the market, a young girl was selling the last flowers of her cold day.
I first saw her three weeks ago, laughing despite her poverty, giving passersby wilting flowers with a smile more alive than the petals themselves.
There was something about that smile that unsettled me—it wasn't pure as it seemed, but false, hiding what deserved punishment.
I approached her slowly, my footsteps fading into the fog.
When she saw me, she lifted her head and shyly said:
"Evening flowers, sir? One flower brings luck."
I smiled—or at least she thought I did.
Then I answered: "No… I seek a flower that does not wither."
That last sentence was the beginning of the end.
I do not remember the blood clearly, the fog mixed with it as if washing away my sin.
All I remember is a beautiful silence, as if the world had paused out of respect for my little art.
The next day, I published a short line in my memoirs:
"True flowers are not sold, they are plucked from the heart of darkness."
People loved the line, wrote about it in newspapers,
and one critic said I possessed "a tragic, enchanting imagination."
How kind they are… and how grateful I am for their foolishness.
I did not know that the journalist Eliza Morgan had read that line and kept it.
She would later say it was not a line of literature, but the beginning of a message from a killer to his city.