Rain fell like needles over the city of Blackglass, washing time away from its ancient walls. The empty streets were crossed only by flickering shadows, distorted by the haze of gas lamps. Everything felt suspended: time, breath, hope.

A black carriage stopped in front of the municipal morgue. The horses snorted nervously, as if sensing what the driver refused to see. A hooded figure stepped down, moving with deliberate slowness. No knock. Just entrance.

Inside, silence was pierced only by the hum of fluorescent lights. A medical examiner waited beside a coffin. Pale and sweating, he kept his eyes lowered. He didn’t dare speak.

The coffin was open. Inside, a young woman. Her skin was pale, unmoving, eyes closed. But what truly unsettled was the black flower sewn between her lips. Sewn shut. With thread. With care.

Then it happened.

Her eyes opened.

Edrick Veil’s study was bathed in dimness, lit only by the flicker of an oil lamp. Books stacked in every corner, newspaper clippings about disappearances, rituals, unexplainable murders. At the center of the desk, a pocket watch had long stopped ticking.

Edrick stared at it, face unreadable. He hadn’t expected anything. Not for a long time.

The door opened with wind and rain. Lira Ashbourne stepped in, hood down, pale eyes filled with a kind of urgency Edrick knew too well. She held a folder in gloved hands.

“We have a body… that’s breathing,” she said, wiping the rain from her forehead.

Edrick raised an eyebrow. “Interesting. They usually do the opposite.”

At the morgue, the smell was one of ammonia, disinfectant, and something more subtle. Wrong. The room itself seemed to hold its breath.

The coroner greeted them with a haunted face. “Doctor Veil… the victim is alive. But… she shouldn’t be.”

The woman lay on a stretcher, wrists restrained. Her eyes were open, but empty. She didn’t speak. The flower had been carefully removed from her mouth. Her lips now trembled slightly.

She took a pen and, with difficulty, wrote on a sheet of paper:

“My name is Eleanor Voss. I was buried alive. My husband tried to kill me.”

Edrick read the note without changing expression. But something lit up behind his eyes.

The blood was coagulated. The body cold. And yet… there she was.

Among the items recovered from the coffin, Edrick found a theater mask. Simple, old, its mouth sewn shut with golden thread. On the back, a handwritten inscription:

“Act One: ‘Till Death Do Us Part.”

Lira brushed her fingers over it. Her breath hitched for a moment. Her eyes clouded. A vision came:

Fog. The tight wood of the coffin. Distant laughter, theatrical. A masked figure leaning over the corpse and whispering: “Welcome to the script.”

Outside, the rain did not stop.

Lira and Edrick walked under a single umbrella, reviewing the death record, the documents, the inconsistencies. Lightning drew spectral outlines on the city’s walls.

“She’s not just a victim. She’s a message,” Lira said.

“A walking corpse. A theater mask. And a killer who writes scripts,” Edrick replied.

Lira pulled her cloak tighter. “A performance. The Harlequin strikes again, right?”

Edrick nodded. “It’s been months since he left a trace. Until now.”

On the highest roof of the morgue, a figure watched through the rain.

The Harlequin mask glinted with each lightning flash. In his fingers, a black flower.

He let it fall.

The flower landed at Edrick’s feet.

He picked it up without a word.

And a whisper, distant, seemed carried by the wind:

“Second act coming soon, detective.”