The Glittering Dark

The invitation arrived on cream-colored paper so thick it could have been carved from ivory. Evelyn Marsh ran her fingers across the embossed lettering, tracing each golden curve with the dedication of a pilgrim touching a relic. The Ashworth Winter Ball. After three years of careful social climbing, calculated charity donations, and perfectly orchestrated dinner parties, she had finally breached the innermost circle of society.

She held the invitation up to the light, watching how the gold leaf caught the afternoon sun streaming through her parlour windows. This was it. This was everything she had worked for, schemed for, sacrificed for. Yet even as triumph should have warmed her chest, a familiar coldness crept in that gnawing awareness that Constance Ashworth's invitation had likely arrived on paper twice as thick, with real gold rather than mere leaf.

The seamstress came three times that week, each visit bringing new swatches of silk and samples of lace. Evelyn rejected them all. The emerald green was too common, the sapphire blue too presumptuous, the ruby red too desperate. She finally settled on a dove grey silk that shimmered with the faintest hint of silver elegant, understated, unthreatening. She had learned long ago that the key to infiltrating society's upper echelons was to appear ambitious enough to be interesting but never so much as to be threatening.

The night of the ball, Evelyn spent four hours preparing. Her lady's maid, Margaret, worked miracles with her mouse-brown hair, weaving in silver ribbons and seed pearls until it resembled a crown of moonlight. The grey gown fit perfectly, each fold calculated to suggest both modesty and wealth. She studied herself in the mirror, turning this way and that, cataloguing every angle. She looked... adequate. Presentable. Forgettable.

The Ashworth mansion blazed with light, every window a golden rectangle against the December darkness. Carriages lined the curved drive like black beetles, disgorging their glittering passengers onto red carpets that had been laid despite the threat of snow. Evelyn watched from her carriage window as Lady Pemberton emerged in peacock blue, diamonds cascading from her throat like a waterfall of stars. Behind her, the Weatherby sisters floated past in matching rose pink, their laughter carrying on the cold air like silver bells.

Inside, the ballroom was a fairyland of crystal and candlelight. Chandeliers dripped from the ceiling like frozen fireworks, each crystal catching and throwing light until the very air seemed to sparkle. The walls were draped in white silk shot through with gold thread, and hothouse roses in December, imagine the expense filled every alcove with their heavy perfume. Evelyn stood at the entrance, her invitation clutched in gloved hands, and felt herself shrink.

Constance Ashworth held court near the orchestra, resplendent in emerald green silk that made Evelyn's rejected fabric seem like sacking in comparison. Her husband, Lord Ashworth, stood beside her, his hand resting possessively on the small of her back. They moved together with the unconscious grace of those who had never questioned their place in the world, who had been born to ballrooms and bred for admiration.

Evelyn circulated carefully, attaching herself to conversational groups like a barnacle to a ship's hull. She laughed at the appropriate moments, offered just enough gossip to seem informed but not malicious, complimented gowns and jewels with practiced sincerity. All the while, her eyes moved constantly, cataloguing everything Lady Pemberton's diamond necklace (a wedding gift from her besotted husband), Miss Weatherby's perfectly formed ringlets (natural, not aided by hot irons), Mrs. Carmichael's effortless wit (inherited from her French mother, no doubt).

The dancing began, and Evelyn found herself partnered with a succession of appropriate but unexciting gentlemen younger sons, widowers, the occasionally desperate bachelor. She moved through the steps mechanically, her smile fixed, her attention elsewhere. Always elsewhere. Watching Constance laugh as Lord Pemberton led her through a waltz. Observing how the candlelight loved Lady Morrison's alabaster skin. Counting the number of men who sought an introduction to the youngest Weatherby sister.

It was during the third waltz that Evelyn noticed the mirrors. The Ashworths had installed them between each window, gilt-framed and enormous, doubling the ballroom's grandeur. In them, she caught glimpses of herself grey and silver among jewel tones, a moth among butterflies. But there was something else in the mirrors too, something that moved when she moved, shadowed her steps with perfect precision.

At first, she thought it was merely her reflection distorted by the candlelight and the movement of dancers. But as the evening wore on, the shadow grew more distinct. It had her shape but not her substance, her form but not her features. And it was green a deep, poisonous green that seemed to pulse with its own light.

The shadow grew stronger with each passing hour, fed by every covetous glance, every comparative thought, every moment of bitter longing. When Lady Pemberton's necklace caught the light, the shadow swelled. When Constance's laugh rang out like golden coins falling, it darkened. When young Mr. Ashworth asked the Weatherby girl for a second dance a clear sign of serious interest the shadow began to sparkle.

Evelyn excused herself from the ballroom, seeking refuge in the ladies' retiring room. But the mirrors there were even worse. In them, the green shadow loomed behind her reflection, and now she could see what those sparkles were fragments of everything she had ever wanted and never possessed. There was the gleam of her mother's pearls, sold to pay for her father's debts. The shine of the engagement ring Harold Fitzgerald had given to another after Evelyn had rejected him for not being wealthy enough. The glitter of tears she'd shed in private while maintaining her perfect public facade.

She splashed cold water on her face, trying to dispel what must surely be a hallucination brought on by too much champagne and too little food. But when she looked up, the shadow was still there, and now it was beginning to separate from her reflection, taking on its own terrible life.

"You feed me so well," it whispered, though it had no mouth. "Every want, every wish, every moment you spend counting what others have it all feeds me."

Evelyn tried to run, but the shadow followed. Not behind her now, but beside her, matching her step for step through the Ashworths' magnificent halls. She passed mirrors and windows, each one showing the shadow growing larger, more substantial. The sparkles multiplied, becoming a glittering cloud that surrounded the green form like a galaxy of stolen dreams.

She burst back into the ballroom, hoping the crowd would dispel this madness. But no one seemed to notice the green spectre at her side. They continued dancing, laughing, living their golden lives while Evelyn stood frozen in the doorway. The shadow leaned close, and she could smell it now the bitter scent of tarnished silver, wilted roses, and disappointment.

"Look at them," it hissed. "Look at everything they have that you don't. Feel it. Let it fill you up until there's room for nothing else."

And Evelyn looked. She couldn't help but look. At Constance's happiness, genuine and unforced. At Lady Pemberton's confidence, born from a lifetime of security. At the Weatherby sisters' easy joy, their futures spread before them like picnic blankets on a summer day. She looked and looked until her eyes burned with unshed tears, until her chest ached with the weight of wanting.

The shadow began to merge with her then, seeping into her skin like ink into paper. The sparkles followed, each one burning cold as it touched her. She tried to scream, but her voice was lost in the orchestra's swell. The other guests danced on, oblivious, as Evelyn Marsh ceased to be singular and became plural woman and shadow, flesh and envy, forever intertwined.

When the servants found her body the next morning, collapsed in the garden where she'd fled, they said she must have been overcome by the cold. Her grey gown was covered in what looked like green glitter, though no one could explain how it had gotten there. Constance Ashworth, genuinely distressed by the death at her ball, paid for the funeral and even attended, wearing appropriate black and expressing sincere condolences.

But those with eyes to see noticed something strange in the mirrors that day. A flicker of green among the mourners' black, a shimmer of something that moved independently of any reflection. And in the years that followed, during moments of acute jealousy when wives compared jewels, when debutantes counted suitors, when mothers measured their children's accomplishments against others' people would sometimes glimpse a figure in windows and mirrors. A grey form shot through with poisonous green, covered in glittering fragments of desire.

The ghost that had been Evelyn Marsh found itself drawn to these moments of comparison like a moth to flame. It would manifest in department store mirrors as women tried on dresses they couldn't afford. In car windows as neighbors observed new purchases. In phone screens as people scrolled through carefully curated lives, counting likes and comparing happiness measured in digital hearts.

Each sparkle that clung to the ghost told a story the engagement ring someone else received, the promotion another earned, the perfect child that belonged to different parents. They accumulated over the decades, these glittering testimonies to human want, until the ghost became less a figure than a constellation of covetousness, a walking reminder of how envy can consume a soul so thoroughly that nothing remains but the wanting itself.

Professor Barnabas Ravenwood encountered this entity only once, during an investigation at a society wedding where the maid of honor had been found catatonic, her hands covered in green glitter that no amount of washing could remove. In his notes, he wrote:

"Of all the sins that can transform a human soul into something other, envy may be the most insidious. It feeds not on what we do, but on what others have. It grows not from our own excess, but from perceived lack. The entity I have designated 'Envy' appears to be drawn to those moments when we measure our worth against others and find ourselves wanting. It cannot grant what is desired it can only reflect back the endless hunger of comparison, the bottomless pit of never-enough. The glitter that adorns it speaks to the magpie nature of envy, collecting shiny fragments of others' lives while never being able to make them truly our own."

The ghost called Envy continues to haunt the spaces between admiration and desire, a glittering reminder that some hungers can never be satisfied, and that the greenest grass is often just a trick of the light a shimmer in a mirror that disappears the moment you try to grasp it.

This completes "the usual" package for Envy. The story connects to your seven deadly sins series while maintaining its own standalone narrative, and includes subtle references to Professor Barnabas Ravenwood to tie it into the broader MGE universe. The green glitter visible in your photos becomes a central element of the ghost's manifestation, representing all the coveted things that fed the character's destructive envy.