Il Collezionista di Bellezze

“The Beauty Collector”

Part 1 — Sometimes Beautiful Things Break

At the Maison de Mémoires, Sirah sat alone in his small workshop, where perfumes were distilled and antiques were coaxed back to life. A sudden urge overtook him—to write, to spill the bitter cocktail of emotions he could no longer swallow. He reached for paper and pen.

The fountain pen trembled in his hand like a relic unworthy of its shrine. He could not decide if it shook from sorrow—what he had turned Ophelia into—or from the confusion of all that now unfolded in Storyville and the French Quarter.

“I write these pages,” he whispered, “not as a scholar, nor as a man of faith, but as one condemned to watch the world unravel, while Storyville slides into shadows and cracks open into the underworld. I am horrified, and so I keep record—like a priest chronicling miracles, or a pope poring over the Codex Sinaiticus, trying to read in scripture the truth of the Old Testament.”

Yet even as he wrote, he felt less like a priest and more like a detective—Moe Smith rearranging scraps of evidence, desperate to glimpse a crime he could never prevent.

What had he done to sweet Ophelia? The Quarter whispered of a false siren—a cheap replica, singing a stolen song. A canary in sequins, mimicking what she could never be. Was this part of the prophecy whispered through the Gallier House?

Ah, the Gallier House… he remembered its macabre tremors. The walls had shuddered as if they breathed her name, though none dared release it. He had followed the trail of broken glass, spilled perfume, and crimsoned goblets—and in every shard he glimpsed her. Not his Mylène, but something that wore her echo.

My God, what had he done? Was it his fault that Ophelia now longed to become another woman?

He was torn. On one hand, he had wished her brought back to life. Yet it should have been his hand to conduct the ritual—not that filthy, grasping mobster Frankie. Frankie had given her what Sirah could not: a promise of something pure. And worse—he had awakened the hunger in that Aimee girl, the emerald-eyed revenant who wore greed like silk gloves.

Sirah marked her rise as he would a dark omen—the undoing of mafia rings, of the blue books that catalogued women like merchandise. Perhaps even the end of Storyville’s giggle-water rivers. Yet he could not tell if he witnessed a reckoning, a messiah’s birth… or the sharpening of another mercenary.

“I am Sirah Cabernet, the collector of beauty… the overseer of humanity. Perhaps guardian. Perhaps executioner. I can no longer tell.”

Part 2 — The Fractured Collection

The more he wrote, the heavier his words became, as though the paper itself longed to bury them. Ophelia had not been his first treasure, nor would she be the last to splinter.

Sirah had always surrounded himself with beautiful things—rare relics, exotic perfumes almost impossible to obtain, and women whose pearly smiles and laughter could fill entire rooms with light. But beauty, when caged too long, begins to suffocate. And in his hands, it always broke.

Ophelia… she had once possessed a sweet sensuality, the timid air of a wholesome girl who lived on fables, fantasies, and fairy-tale romances. She had idealized him, painted him as the prince of her story. Ah, poor Ophelia—her innocence seemed incorruptible, her kindness only deepened her beauty.

And yet he, Sirah Cabernet—praised as the bee’s knees, with a charm that could seduce even the hardest mafioso, and damned for his greed for life, women, and wine—saw her not as wife, but as relic. A rare pink diamond for the cabinet. A flame to keep under glass.

And so she fractured, like a glass slipper against the stone floor.

Shattered glass. He no longer knew if he had ever truly loved her—or simply found her beautiful enough to collect.

What he had seen tonight in the Quarter was not his Ophelia. His Ophelia did not rouge her lips into blood, nor wear sequins of gold, nor raise her voice in mimicry of another woman’s song. She had never ventured into dens like Le Cœur Noir—let alone swayed her hips like a creature in heat, singing to ivory keys beneath the eyes of men.

He had turned a good girl into a desperate siren, chasing the validation of the male gaze.

Every stroke of powder to whiten her skin was an apology for not being Mylène. Every feather she pinned to her hair was a theft. She was no longer Ophelia, but a Glass Siren—curated by his obsession, shattered by his hunger for beauty.

And she was the crown piece of his fractured collection.

Part 3 — The Collector’s Curse

His words kept filling page after page as if he were writing a confessional novel, spilling from him like a glass of merlot overturned on white marble, staining everything it touched.

Ophelia was not his first victim, not the first he had broken beneath his hunger. Many women had suffered the same fate, but none had gone so far as to erase themselves and become someone else. His entire existence had been a mausoleum of decayed beauties turned to ash—perfumes drained of fragrance, relics crumbled from being polished too many times, lovers faded into ghosts under the weight of his jealous possession.

Just as Othello drove Desdemona to ruin, Sirah reduced his women to dust-fairies, forgotten as quickly as a midsummer’s dream.

That was his curse: beauty could not endure adoration. Especially not his, for he corrupted everything he touched. Perhaps that was why he had been unable to perform the ritual to awaken Mylène. He was tainted. Impure.

But the thought gnawed at him. Frankie was nothing but a button man, owner of a juice joint where the worst of men came to watch sequined girls with feathers and red lips sing the night away. Why had that bastard been able to do what he could not?

Humanity itself was a vast cabinet of collectors. He was not alone in this hunger. Everyone reached for what they wanted, hoarding the very things they claimed to love. Roses gilded until their petals bruised and rotted. Canaries caged until their songs grew dull. Women worshipped until their faces bored the eye, their bloom discarded when it faded.

That was the cycle. That was life.

“I am not guilty for wanting the world to be beautiful,” he whispered. “I only live as the system dictates… as society functions. I am no villain. I am only an observer of beautiful things.”

But the page betrayed him. The words carved him open.

“The collector does not cherish,” he muttered under his breath. “He consumes. Until nothing remains.”

He had claimed to be guardian, protector, chronicler. But in truth, he was the executioner of all he claimed to love.

Part 4 — The Mirror of Prophecy

The candle beside him began to flicker as if dancing to some phantom rhythm in Congo Square. Suddenly it sputtered with a violent hiss, sending Sirah into a jolt. The ink on the paper bled as though the page itself had been stabbed for telling the truth. The workshop grew suffocating, the walls pressing closer, as if even silence wished to choke him.

Then the mirror on the far wall, set against its velvet wallpaper, began to quiver. The iron frame rattled against the plaster. The glass rippled like black water from the swamps, disturbed by something unseen.

“Not this again…” Sirah muttered under his breath.

The mirror spat his name in blood-red letters: Sirah Cabernet.

The candles dimmed, their flames bowing low. The reflection rippled as if a jazz demon had struck its keys, collapsing under its own ivories. Shadows twisted across the workshop walls, forming women’s figures that leered at him with cruel delight.

Then the voice spoke—raspy, malevolent, familiar.

“You are not a scholar.
You are not a man.
Not even a villain…”

The sound dragged through the air, dry and cracking, like ravens tearing at carrion.

“You are a reflection of Sin.
The cause.
The root.
The stench.
A vessel.”

“Do not forget what you are.”

Sirah lurched upright, legs betraying him, stumbling against the edge of the wooden desk. He steadied himself, heart pounding like a funeral trombone.

He had read prophecy in that mirror before—back in the Gallier House: the Twelve Karmic Princesses, the Seven Sins, the Lords of Crown and Sin. But never had the glass judged him.

Now it did.

Part 5 — The Premonition

With trembling hands, he lowered himself back into the chair. Sirah felt as if he had been struck in the gut, the air stolen from his chest.

The candle beside him was nearly spent, its flame a frail twig about to snap. That skeleton of light revealed the mirror across the room had stilled once more, erasing the blood-letters of his name. Yet the silence left him uneasy.

Protector. Chronicler. Collector.

He wrote the words as a reminder of who he believed himself to be. But the echo of the mirror gnawed at the edges of the page, twisting the letters into darker shapes:

Vessel. Stench. Executioner.

For the first time in years, Sirah wondered if these notes were not his own at all—if each line of ink, each bleeding confession, had been dictated by something far older, far stronger, far more merciless than him.

The prophecy had become flesh the night Aimee was awakened. And now it lived inside him.

Sirah Cabernet understood at last: he was not a witness to history. He was a vessel, bound to it.

🕯️ Felt the pull? Let her haunt someone new.

If this chapter moved you, pass it on.
One soul. One shadow. One whisper.
Mylène remembers the ones who speak her name.

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