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

She found him where the air felt thickest.

In the eastern corridor—a place that didn't exist on the blueprints she'd been shown during her brief tour of the manor—stood a door she didn't remember opening, yet somehow knew to enter.

Inside: a wide gallery chamber, low-ceilinged and velvet-walled, lit only by the iron chandelier above and candle sconces on the walls. Shadows stretched long and close, pooling in corners like they were listening.

Maboroshi stood at the far end, facing a long wall of covered frames. Draped in black cloth, they resembled figures at mourning—heads bowed, waiting for ceremony. He stood perfectly still, hands behind his back.

There was something about the line of his shoulders—rigid yet calm—that made her chest tighten.

"The dressing room. The cradle. The photograph on the wall—it's gone. But the cradle… it was warm." Her voice softened. "Too warm."

"I opened the second trunk. My name was on it."

His face was as it always was—beautiful, impossible, unreadable. His black clothes had not shifted. His shirt cuffs were still buttoned. But something in his eyes had changed.

She couldn't name it. But it watched her more closely than before.

"You knew I'd go back," she said. "You left it for me. The dresses. The plaque. You've been setting this up—these rooms, these objects."

"I didn't leave anything," he said calmly. "You did."

"You keep saying that." Her voice wavered now. "That I left things. Promised things. But I don't remember any of it. Not you. Not this place. Not the girl in the photo. I don't remember me."

It was quiet. Heavy. The smile of someone who had waited through a hundred winters and was finally seeing a single green shoot pierce the snow.

"Some things," he said, "don't photograph well."

"Does memory need proof to matter?"

She folded her arms across her chest. "You're not answering me."

He was in front of her now. Closer than she expected.

And suddenly, the room felt smaller.

"I want nothing," he said. "Except what you already gave."

He raised his hand slowly—so slowly she had time to flinch, but didn't—and brushed his fingers along the collar of her coat.

But he lingered anyway, dragging the pad of his thumb over the fabric until it rested just above the hollow of her throat.

"You still carry it," he said. "The way you did before."

He stepped closer. Only an inch. But enough.

His eyes held hers, steady. Not demanding. Just waiting.

The kind of gaze that didn't ask you to kneel—but made you wonder what it would feel like if you did.

Heat flooded her cheeks before she could stop it.

Leaving her there, heart pounding, collar still warm, and the scent of him—smoke, cedar, and a hint of something floral—settling in her lungs like a promise.

Maboroshi’s Answerless Smile