Clara watched from the shadows of the hallway, her fingers resting lightly on the wooden frame of the door, just out of sight. The chapel was softly lit, golden sconces casting a flickering warmth that did little to soften the weight in the air. The scent of lilies-too sweet, too thick, almost suffocating-mingled with the low murmur of sorrow, quiet voices dipping in and out of the stillness.

  She was not meant to be here. Not in this way. Not as a guest. Not as a mourner. She only came to watch.

  The woman in the casket, Mrs. Ellison, was the same one Clara had worked on two nights ago. The bruises had been erased, the skin given back its warmth, the lips restored with a delicate shade of rose. A small act of defiance against death.

  And now, as the family came forward in slow, hesitant steps, as trembling fingers reached out to touch the still, peaceful hands, Clara searched their faces for something-relief, gratitude, maybe even love.

  A younger woman, possibly a sister, stood the longest, fingers gripping the edge of the polished mahogany as if grounding herself. Clara saw the moment her breath hitched, a single sob swallowed before it could break free.

  As the family murmured farewells, one of the lilies dropped a petal-soundless, unnoticed-curling against the pale wood like a whisper turned solid.

  Clara had seen it before-the shift in grief when the dead look almost alive. The hesitation, the brief flicker of doubt. She looks like she's just sleeping. That was the point, wasn't it?

  The work was not for the dead. It never had been. It was for them. For the ones left behind, the ones who needed to believe, even for a fleeting moment, that nothing had been stolen from them. That what they had lost was merely resting.

  "Morbid little habit, this," a voice murmured behind her. Clara flinched before composing herself, slowly straightening. She didn't have to turn around to recognize the speaker.

  Mr. Halloway, the funeral home director, was standing with his hands tucked into his pockets, posture easy, but gaze knowing. He was an older man, dressed impeccably as always, his greying hair neatly combed, his tie a shade too dark for the somber event. Clara glanced at him, then back at the chapel, where the murmurs of the grieving filled the silence like waves lapping against a shore.

  "I was just-"

  "Admiring your handiwork?" Halloway finished for her. He exhaled through his nose, shaking his head with something between amusement and pity. "You do good work, Clara. But watching them won't change anything."

  She said nothing. He sighed. "You spend so much time with the dead, you forget you belong with the living."

  Clara turned her gaze back to the casket, to the family that clung to the illusion she had carefully painted. She understood what Halloway meant. Instead of answering, she stepped back from the doorway, slipping into the dim light of the corridor. "I should leave."

  Halloway studied her for a long moment, then shook his head with a wry chuckle. "One day, Clara, you're going to realise you can't spend your whole life waiting in doorways."

  She didn't reply. She only walked away, leaving behind the scent of lilies, the murmurs of the mourning, and the small, fleeting moment where death looked almost beautiful.

  "Clara," Halloway called after her, making her pause mid-step. She turned back, brows lifting slightly.

  He adjusted the cuff of his jacket with a casual flick of his wrist. "Before you vanish into the mist, Nina asked me to tell you to stop by the shop. Says you've been avoiding her."

  A corner of Clara's mouth tugged upward, a fleeting ghost of a smile. "I've been working late."

  "That's what I told her," Halloway said dryly, "but you know how she gets. She's threatening to unleash a battalion of sunflowers on your doorstep if you don't show your face soon."

  Clara huffed a soft breath that might have been a laugh. She could already picture it-Nina, beautiful and stubborn, surrounded by a wild tangle of flowers that somehow thrived under her chaotic care. Dark curls pinned messily out of her eyes, hands always dusted with pollen or soil, her shop a riot of colour and scent in a city otherwise dulled by stone and rain.

  "I'll stop by," Clara promised.

  "Good," Halloway said, with the satisfaction of a man who had delivered his message and would now wash his hands of the affair. "She misses you, you know."

  Clara hesitated, the words catching her in a place she didn't like to acknowledge. As she made her way down the hall, she could still feel Halloway's gaze on her back. When she reached the end of the corridor, she hesitated, then glanced over her shoulder.

  "If I did belong with the living," she mused, more to herself than to him, "I'd be a terrible fit." Halloway let out a short, dry laugh. "The living won't notice you're out of place. They're too busy pretending they fit"

  Clara smirked faintly at that, the kind of smile that didn't reach her eyes. She pushed the door open with her shoulder and stepped out into the city, leaving the warmth of the funeral home- and Halloway's parting words -behind her. They clung to her all the same, trailing after her like a second shadow as she descended into the waiting arms of the rain.

  The city stretched before her like a half-forgotten dream, soft with mist and shadow. Erelis wore the rain well - the cobbled streets slick with silver, the hanging lanterns swinging gently on their iron posts, casting molten puddles of light that rippled beneath each drop. Overgrown gardens spilled through wrought iron fences, heavy with wet blooms: peonies, hydrangeas, honeysuckle clinging stubbornly to stone walls. The scent of damp earth and bruised petals rose around her, thick enough to taste.

  Clara pulled her coat tighter and moved forward, boots clicking softly against the uneven stones. To her left, the river threaded its slow, ancient path through the heart of the city, catching the fractured lights of crooked lampposts and shuttered windows. Somewhere far off, a ferry horn sounded, low and mournful.

  This was Erelis at its most honest, she thought: not the bustling, knife-bright city of market mornings and crowded festival nights, but the secret version of itself that emerged when the rain fell and the crowds fled. A city that remembered its dead. A city where life grew wild and unbidden in the cracks.

  She passed the bookshops first, its windows steamed against the cold, the faint outline of spines stacked high like crooked teeth. A dim figure moved behind the glass, shelving the last of the day's trades, and for a moment Clara thought she saw herself reflected there - pale, hollow-eyed, drifting. She pushed on.

  The streets narrowed into older lanes, strung with sagging wires and the occasional stubborn vine. Here, the lamps burned lower, their glass caged in rusted iron, the glow honey-thick against the mist. Paper lanterns hung in the windows of shuttered teahouses, their crimson light bleeding out onto the wet stone, smeared by the rain.

  Beyond them, the neighborhoods shifted again -from the sharp neon scars of the merchant quarter to the soft, green heart where the city had refused to die properly. Flowers spilled over every threshold here, windowsills and doorways choked with colour even under the grey drizzle. Rain clung to every leaf and petal, turning the street into a slow-blooming garden of ghosts.

  Nina's shop sat tucked in the crook of a narrow alley, half-swallowed by ivy and climbing roses. A weathered wooden sign swung overhead, creaking softly in the damp breeze: Thorn and Thistle Through the paned windows, the shop glowed - a small, defiant hearth against the wet grey of the world.

  Clara paused outside for a moment, letting the sight of it wash over her. Shelves sagged under the weight of wildflowers and potted herbs, vines tangling through the rafters like green smoke. Bouquets hung drying from the ceiling in bursts of faded gold and crimson, their scent thick and heady even through the door. Somewhere inside, she could just make out Nina's voice, humming low and tuneless over the distant clink of scissors on glass.

  The warmth of it pressed against the cold in her bones. A stubborn, living thing. Clara smirked faintly, shaking her head at herself- and pushed open the door.

  A bell chimed overhead, soft and sweet. The rain might have stolen the city, but here, inside, life still won.

  Heavy with the perfume of crushed herbs and the faint bite of rain-soaked earth. The door swung closed behind Clara with a soft sigh, cutting off the city's weary murmur. Before she could call out, a figure barrelled into her - arms thrown wide, a tangle of dark curls and floral-scented breath.

  "Clara!" Nina's voice was bright, threaded with a laughter that lived just shy of her lips. She squeezed her hard enough to force the breath from her chest, then pulled back, studying her with dark, assessing eyes. "You look awful."

  Clara snorted under her breath. "Nice to see you too."

  "No, I mean it affectionately," Nina said, grinning without apology. She tugged Clara deeper into the shop, past sagging shelves heavy with blooms. "Awful in the way the living always do."

  They wove through the clutter, their steps familiar, unhurried. It had always been this way between them -a quiet comfort. They had met a few years back, not long after Clara had first started at the morgue. Nina had been setting up Thorn and Thistle then, filling the crumbling bones of the old apothecary with wild colour and stubborn life. Somehow, in a city that so often prized death, they had recognised something kindred in each other: the urge to build beauty where rot wanted to reign.

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  Clara shrugged off her coat, draping it over a battered armchair that was half-eclipsed by a monstrous fern. "Busy," she said. "Busier than usual. More deaths lately."

  "Yeah, I heard," Nina said, wrinkling her nose. She crouched by a drooping hyacinth, adjusting its support twine with deft fingers. "One of them happened just down the street. Stabbing. Right outside the tea shop."

  Clara frowned, instinct tightening between her ribs. "You shouldn't be walking home alone right now. Not with the way the city's been... shifting."

  Nina waved her off, but there was a tightness at the corner of her mouth that didn't match her flippant tone. "Erelis has always been a little stab-happy, hasn't it?"

  Clara watched her for a moment longer. Nina's fingers were quick, clever, always moving - but her eyes darted once toward the rain-smeared windows. The world outside had changed. Even Nina could feel it.

  "Still," Clara said quietly, "be careful."

  Nina straightened and offered her a crooked smile. "You're the one who spends her nights with corpses, darling. I'm more afraid for you."

  Clara allowed herself a rare, genuine smile. "Occupational hazard."

  Before Nina could respond, the bell above the door chimed -sharp, insistent. Two figures stepped inside, shedding rain from their shoulders. A man and a woman, both dressed in the plain, practical clothes of civil servants, though the man carried a subtle, unsettling weight that didn't quite match his boyish face.

  He had light brown hair, thick and curling slightly with the damp, and eyes the green of moss after rain -soft, searching, and strangely out of place against the grim set of his mouth. His features were delicate, almost angelic: a face better suited to chapels and dreamers than murder scenes. And yet, there was a gravity to him, a stillness, like a blade hidden under velvet.

  Clara felt his gaze brush over her, a touch so careful she might have imagined it, The woman beside him, practical and sharper, gave a polite nod as she shook the rain from her coat.

  "Good afternoon," she said, her voice smooth "Detective Aldren. My partner, Elise Cavanagh. We're looking into an incident that occurred nearby -a violent assault. We're checking with local businesses for any witnesses, or anyone who might have seen something."

  Nina straightened, hands instinctively smoothing the apron tied over her dress. "You mean the stabbing?"

  Gabriel Aldren -the angel-faced detective -said nothing at first, only watching, as if the flowers themselves might confess. Clara felt the weight of that glance catch on her like a thorn snagging cloth.

  Gabriel- nodded once, crisp and detached. His gaze, however, had drifted back to Clara, lingering just a moment too long.There was a flicker there-something almost imperceptible. Clara felt it catch low in her ribs, a strange, suspended moment-before he schooled his face back into neutrality.

  Clara met his gaze with a coolness of her own, the practiced stillness she wore better than any coat. Gabriel cleared his throat, the sound low, almost reluctant.

  "We're canvassing the area for any witnesses," he said, his tone clipped but polite. "The assault took place late evening -between the tea house and the riverside quarter. We're particularly interested in anything unusual you might have seen. Even small details."

  His moss-green eyes, startling against the muted palette of his uniform, brushed over Clara again -quick, clinical. Almost. Clara tilted her head slightly, a movement so small it might have gone unnoticed, save for the way it sharpened the weight of her gaze. She was used to scrutiny -from grieving families, from curious strangers -but there was something different about this man's attention. Not prying. Not leering. Just... measuring.

  Clara shifted slightly, the leather strap of her bag creaking against her shoulder. "What night did it happen?" she asked, her voice quiet but firm.

  Gabriel met her gaze without hesitation. "Three nights ago. Just after dusk."

  Clara gave a small shake of her head. "I wasn't here. I work across the river."

  His mouth pressed into a line, as if filing the information away somewhere behind those steady moss-green eyes."And you?" Elise asked, her tone lighter, offering Nina a smile that warmed the air between them. "Were you working late?"

  Nina tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, her hands never straying far from the counter, from the soil and the blooms that rooted her. "Closed up just after six. I didn't see anything. But-" She hesitated, glancing at Clara. "There's been... a feeling. Like the city's holding its breath."

  Elise's brows lifted slightly, but she only nodded, making a note in her battered leather notebook.

  Gabriel didn't write anything. He only watched -the shop, the women, the heavy scent of rain-drenched roses curling through the air like smoke. This shop was alive in a way few places were anymore: the walls half-drowned in ivy, dried blooms weeping their sweet decay from the rafters, pots crowding every surface. It smelled of rain and rot and the stubbornness of life clinging to crumbling stone. Gabriel's gaze returned to Clara, resting there with a gravity that felt heavier than before.

  He shifted his weight, almost imperceptibly, looking through the two women standing infront of him. "Is there anyone else here?"

  "Is there anyone else here?" he asked, glancing over Clara's shoulder into the deeper recesses of the shop.

  Both women exchanged a look. "No," Nina said, bewildered. "Just us."

  Gabriel's frown deepened, a furrow cutting between his brows.

  Nina, ever unbothered by strangeness, waved a hand toward the riot of plants around them. "Unless you're counting the greenery." She grinned. "Talk to them often enough, you know. Flowers have personalities. Tulips are my favorite -feisty little things, stubborn as saints. You have to bargain with them to bloom properly."

  Clara gave a quiet, helpless chuckle, while Nina beamed at her own absurdity.

  Gabriel's expression didn't shift. Elise, though trying to remain professional, looked as though she was reconsidering her life choices. Gabriel handed each of them a business card -white, plain, no-frills -and murmured, "If you remember anything..., please call."

  Without waiting for further invitation, he turned and stepped back into the rain, Elise offering a quick, apologetic smile before following. The bell above the door chimed again as the shop fell back into its breathing, floral silence. Nina waited until the footsteps had faded before letting out a low whistle. "Friendly bunch, aren't they?"

  Clara tucked the business card into her pocket without looking at it. "You're lucky they didn't try interrogating your tulips."

  "Ha," Nina said, bending to pluck a wilting leaf from a nearby rosebush. "I'd like to see them try."

  But even as she joked, Clara found herself glancing once more at the door, the ghost of Gabriel Aldren's gaze still lingering like a hand against her skin. The shop fell back into its slow, living hush, the rain whispering against the windows like a second heartbeat.

  Nina let out a breath and leaned back against the counter, eyeing Clara with a crooked smile. "Well, that was cheerful."

  Clara snorted softly, but her fingers brushed the business card still tucked into her pocket, the weight of Gabriel Aldren's gaze lingering heavier than she cared to admit. Nina pushed off the counter and disappeared into the clutter for a moment, returning with a bouquet cradled in her arms - wild and unkempt, a riot of colour against the muted tones of the shop. Peonies, foxgloves, small blooms of violet and cream, bound loosely with twine.

  "Here," she said, pressing it into Clara's hands before she could protest. "You look like you need a reminder that the world can still make beautiful things."

  The flowers were cool against Clara's palms, their scent heady -green, earthy, stubbornly alive. She inhaled it without meaning to, something tight inside her chest easing by a fraction.

  "You didn't have to," she murmured.

  Nina shrugged, fussing with a stray curl. "I know. I wanted to." A beat of quiet stretched between them- not awkward, but heavy with all the things they didn't say. About the city, about the creeping violence neither of them could name. About the way the streets felt narrower, hungrier, after sunset.

  Nina glanced at the darkening sky beyond the rain-streaked windows. "I can close up early. Walk you part of the way, if you want." Clara shook her head, tucking the bouquet carefully under one arm. "I'll be fine. It's not far."

  "You sure?" Nina asked, frowning. "The city's been... strange lately."

  "I'm sure," Clara said, offering a small, tired smile. "Besides, someone's got to stay and bargain with the tulips." That earned a soft laugh from Nina, though her eyes stayed serious.

  Clara moved toward the door, the bell overhead trembling faintly as she pushed it open. The scent of wet stone and blooming things followed her into the mist.

  "Text me when you get home, you corpse-wrangling hermit," Nina called after her, voice bright but thin at the edges. Clara lifted a hand in mock salute and stepped into the rain. The city swallowed her almost at once.

  Nina's warm hug still lingered as Clara stepped away from her friend's door and into the twilight. She cradled the bouquet Nina had given her-a tumble of blossoms that glowed softly in the dimming light. The rain had eased to a fine mist, and streaks of gold from the sunset still painted the western sky, fading into a deep blue overhead where the first stars appeared. Streetlamps flickered on one by one along the cobbled street, their warm glow reflecting in shimmering puddles at Clara's feet.

  The cool air smelled of wet stone and sweet petals; the bouquet's fragrance mingled with the earthy scent of rain-soaked streets, comforting her as darkness gently settled over the city.

  Clara turned down a narrow lane toward the river Elkie, drawn by the quiet murmur of water in the darkness. The river wound through Erelis like a ribbon of black glass, catching the silver of a crescent moon now peeking between passing clouds. Rows of townhouses and old lamps lined the riverside, their golden lights dancing in long reflections on the gentle current. A few leaves, still dripping from the earlier rain, brushed her shoulder as she passed under an overhanging branch. Clara paused on a stone bridge to watch the water and clouds drift by, the whole cityscape drifting along the river's surface, blurred into a living painting.

  For a moment, she recalled the distant wail of sirens and the collective hush that fell over the city after the recent stabbing. That memory cast a faint shadow on her heart, but it did not define Erelis in her eyes. This was her home-a city where darkness and light intertwined in every wet cobblestone and warm window glow. Tonight, in the hush after the rain, Clara sensed the gentle side of Erelis: the glow of lamps, the whispering river, and the kindness in a gift of flowers. In that balance, she found a somber comfort; life continued alongside loss, each giving the other meaning.

  Eventually, Clara cut through the courtyard of the old city hall-a grand building whose spires loomed against the murky sky. The rain had picked up again in a fine curtain, blurring the edges of lamplight that pooled around the empty square and over the drenched red blossoms lining the steps. As she descended the wide stone stairway, she noticed an old woman standing just beyond the halo of a hanging lantern.

  The woman was draped in a tattered shawl and stood perfectly still, gazing up into the rain as if lost in a trance. Clara slowed her steps, an involuntary shiver running through her; something about how silently the woman had appeared was uncanny-almost as if the shadows themselves had taken shape and come alive.

  Clara met the woman's eyes and offered a polite nod as she drew nearer. The stranger's pale lips curved into a faint smile, and in a quavering singsong voice she rasped, "Lovely flowers, my dear... they light up the night." Clara stopped in her tracks at the remark, a reply caught in her throat-but in the blink of an eye, the old woman was gone.

  A wooden door under the arch creaked shut, and the tap of hurried footsteps faded around a corner. Clara exhaled and let the tension drain from her chest. Surely the woman had simply slipped away into some dry nook of the building, leaving her alone once more with the falling rain.

  The rest of Clara's walk led her along silent streets and another stretch of the moonlit river, deeper into the heart of Erelis. Heavy clouds drifted across the sky, shrouding the moon and casting restless shadows over the water. The ornate dome of an old basilica rose on the opposite bank, its massive silhouette mirrored in the river's inky surface. Apart from Clara's gentle footsteps, the only sounds were the distant drip of water from eaves and the occasional flutter of a night bird taking wing.

  Every so often, Clara felt the subtle prickle of unseen eyes on her back-perhaps a curtain stirring where someone watched from an upstairs window, or simply the ancient city observing one of its children at home in the night.

  In Erelis, one often felt quietly observed, but Clara had long ceased to find it unsettling. To her, that subtle watchfulness was almost a comfort. It reminded her that even in solitude, she walked with the city's silent companionship, never truly alone.