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

Yuriko photographs the body. As she composes the shot, her fainting spell returns. She stumbles—into Maboroshi's arms. He steadies her, his hands lingering. He speaks in a near-whisper: "You always used to fall, when we did this."

Yuriko brought the camera to her eye, hands steady from habit, not certainty. Through the lens, the bridal corpse became more than a body—she became intentional. Every curve, every tilt, every line of silk conspired to tell a story. A final one. A performance after breath had stopped.

The sound was louder in the velvet-muted room than it should have been.

She moved closer. The body's eyes were closed, but the lashes cast soft shadows across the cheeks. The mouth—slightly parted—seemed like it might exhale at any moment.

Her fingers hesitated on the shutter. Something felt wrong—not in the room, not in the body—but in her own head. A pressure. A pull.

No, she thought. Not now.

The candlelight streaked into gold ribbons.

The velvet walls stretched like wet cloth.

Her legs folded beneath her without permission.

She felt his arms around her—the precise, firm way he held her, like someone who had done this before. Not in panic, but with practiced patience.

Her cheek pressed against his chest. He smelled like dust and rain and the faint sweetness of overripe pears.

His voice came low, just above her ear.

"You always used to fall," he said. "When we did this."

She didn't know if she whispered back or just thought it:

He helped her to the velvet bench by the wall.

His hands lingered a moment longer than needed at her waist before pulling away.

Yuriko sat still, spine pressed against the carved wood backing, her breath slowly syncing with the room again. The candles flickered as if in rhythm with her pulse.

"No need," Maboroshi replied. "The first one is always too much."

He reached out, gently adjusted the camera strap that had fallen from her shoulder, his fingers brushing her collarbone.

"You have the eye," he said. "You always did."

There was no heat in it. Not desire.

Like he was looking at something he had once owned, long ago, and never truly lost.

A Touch Too Still