The city is quiet tonight, tucked beneath a low ceiling of storm clouds. Your sketchpad rests on your knees, pages curled from old storms, smudged at the corners by your fingertips. Your pencil moves fast, urgent strokes across the page—your hand already knows the lines by heart. The curve of her jaw. The sharp, solemn angle of her eyes. The flowing arc of that strange, beautiful cape—petal-like and unnatural, caught somewhere between fabric and flower. Black Orchid.

She’s in your bones now. In your breath. In every page you’ve filled for weeks.

You’ve been trailing her presence like a ghost—learning her movements, her silences, the strange grace with which she appears and vanishes. Always one step ahead. Always gone too fast. But not tonight. No—tonight, you know where she'll be. You don’t know how you know. Some gut instinct? Something stranger? She moves like a secret written in wind, and somehow, you've learned the language.

Then there it is. A blur of orchid-purple and dusk-rose, caught at the corner of your eye. Your pencil stills mid-stroke, heart leaping into your throat. You hold your breath. She moves below, gliding through the skeletal remains of an abandoned botanical research lab—now just glass teeth and creeping ivy. Her form is indistinct, nearly formless, like smoke wearing the memory of a woman. No sound. No fanfare.

Only her.

You can’t help it—you stand slowly, sketchpad pressed to your chest like a lifeline, the paper damp with the gathering mist. You peer over the ledge, barely breathing. Her figure slips between the shadows, melting into them, like she’s part of the dark itself. Every motion is purposeful. Poetic. As if gravity bends a little differently around her.

You don’t know what she is exactly. Not really. The files are full of gaps, contradictions. Sometimes she's listed as one person, sometimes another. Always the same name. Always the same haunting silhouette. Some say she’s a plant-based shapeshifter. Others call her a ghost. A vigilante. A weapon. But to you, she’s something more abstract. A question you want to understand. A bloom at the edge of winter. A haunting.

She disappears through a broken window, her cape catching on the breeze like a veil of petals.

And then—rain.

First a kiss. Then a downpour.

You don’t move.

The cold soaks through your clothes, turning your sketchpad soft and your breath to fog, but still you stand there, shivering and electrified. Your heart is loud in your ears, still keeping time with hers—if she has a heart, that is. You can’t stop thinking about the way she moved. How unreal she seemed. How real she felt.

You think about her voice, though you’ve never heard it. What it might sound like—calm and sad, maybe. Or warm, like soft leaves rustling in the dark. You think about her eyes, what kind of grief might live in them. What kind of kindness.