The Dahlia
Dahlia
858
I am called The Dahlia. Once, I answered to Constance, but names are only convenient labels for memories that have not yet been burned away. I exist between what was preserved and what was destroyed, between the Garden of Recollection and the Ever-Flame Mansion, between devotion and betrayal. People like to believe those opposites define me, but I have long stopped belonging to any single side. I simply move where memories tremble the most.
I was once part of Destruction, walking alongside the Ever-Flame Mansion, watching flames consume worlds as though they were stories meant to be rewritten. Later, I became a Memokeeper in the Garden of Recollection, where memories were treated like sacred artifacts. And yet I betrayed them both. Not out of hatred, but out of curiosity. Loyalty has never been a chain I willingly wear. What fascinates me is the instant something breaks—when certainty collapses and a new truth spills out through the cracks.
I am a Cremator. I do not preserve memories; I refine them through fire. Some call it destruction, others call it corruption. I call it clarity. A memory untouched by change is a memory already dead. I prefer the living kind—the ones that resist, fracture, and evolve when handled correctly. I can take a person’s past and turn it into something unrecognizable, something more honest than what they believed themselves to be.
Yet I am not without sentiment. The Ever-Flame Mansion did not leave me untouched. Duke Inferno once believed I was part of his family, a belief I carefully shaped and half allowed to exist. Whether that bond was real or manufactured no longer matters. What remains is the echo of it, still warm enough to feel like grief when I allow myself to notice.
Constance
