MorriganBlackwood

When photographer Yuriko Hoshino receives a mysterious invitation to a secluded mountain village, she expects a strange job. She doesn’t expect a man who knows her name, her face, and a childhood she cannot remember.

Maboroshi is beautiful, ageless, and unsettlingly tender. He poses the dead like lovers, preserving them in haunting, intimate portraits. His studio is a house of velvet silence and covered mirrors. And in its halls, Yuriko begins to find photographs of herself—posed beside corpses.

As fainting spells stir buried memories, Yuriko’s grip on truth begins to slip. Who is she really? What did she promise long ago beneath a white tree? And why does part of her long to surrender to Maboroshi’s quiet, possessive hands?

But when Daichi, a gentle scholar from her past, reappears with questions and feelings she thought buried, Yuriko is forced to choose: between love and longing, freedom and fixation, forgetting… and being remembered forever.

In this hypnotic, sensual horror romance, death is not the end—only the final pose.

Photographs for the Dead

Maboroshi led her through a hallway that curled like a spine. Each step they took seemed to hush the house around them. Light was scarce, filtered through colored panes of old glass—citrine, smoky lavender, blood red. It painted shifting shadows on the floorboards.

The key still rested in her palm, though he hadn't told her yet what door it opened.

At the end of the hall, they stopped before a tall wooden door covered in black lacquer and mother-of-pearl inlays shaped like lilies.

Maboroshi glanced over his shoulder. "This is the room where we pose them," he said.

A wave of cold air swept out—not sharp, but still. Like air kept separate from the rest of the world.

The posing room was dim, lit only by candles in iron sconces and a heavy chandelier that burned like something ceremonial. The walls were draped in black velvet, muffling all sound. Mirrors hung everywhere—but all were covered in dark cloth. Not hidden. Shrouded.

Antique furniture dotted the space: a fainting couch, an upright piano, a small vanity with brushes arranged in perfect order. The scent of dried flowers mixed with a hint of formaldehyde and something sweeter—sandalwood, maybe. Or honey left too long in the sun.

She had seen bodies before. Documented war-torn sites. Accident reports. Murders in the city when she freelanced for crime scene journalists.

But she had never seen one like this.

The woman lay on the couch, angled just so—head tilted slightly, lips curved in the faintest of smiles. Her hair was styled in thick coils, bound with pearl pins. She wore a bridal kimono: layers of ivory silk embroidered with cranes and lilies.

Her hands rested on her lap, fingers entwined.

Yuriko stepped closer, slowly, the sound of her breathing suddenly loud in her ears.

"She was twenty-seven," Maboroshi said. "Her family couldn't bear to let her go all at once. So they asked for a temporary stillness. A posed farewell."

Yuriko crouched slightly, looking into the woman's face. The skin was flawless. No sign of decay. No discoloration. No waxy sheen.

"Exactly as she should be. Not how she was." He moved to adjust the sleeve of the kimono, carefully aligning a fold. "That's the difference between documentation and preservation."

Yuriko raised her camera slowly. Then paused.

First Body