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 said nothing as he guided her through the manor's winding halls, yet somehow Yuriko knew to follow. The sound of her own footsteps trailed behind her, hesitant and too loud.

The route he took didn't feel familiar, though she was certain they hadn't left the main floor.

At the end of a narrow corridor was a door—dark wood, no handle. A seam in the wall more than a true entrance.

The door opened inward with a slow groan, releasing a draft that smelled of old pigment, melted wax, and something metallic.

Yuriko hesitated a moment longer, then followed.

The room was round, candlelit, and completely silent.

Portraits lined the circular walls, each under glass, some framed in gold, others in dark carved wood. The candlelight made the oil glisten. The floor was black tile, cold under her soles. The air seemed pressed in by age.

She moved slowly from painting to painting.

Many faces were strangers—women in veils, men in formal wear, children with soft vacant eyes—but several looked disturbingly familiar. Not in detail. In pose. She recognized their hands. Their gestures. The shape of their throats.

One portrait showed a girl sitting beside a cradle. Her back was to the viewer. The cradle was turned just enough to see inside: empty.

A massive frame, taller than she was, sat on an easel of wrought iron. Its canvas was only half-complete—one side rendered in precise oil, the other unfinished, sketchy, ghostlike.

The finished side showed her.

Dressed in black silk, face turned to the side, lips parted ever so slightly. Her eyes were closed. Her expression soft, almost…

The unfinished half was all rough pencil lines and pale underpainting. It captured her shoulder, the slope of her neck—but where her hand should be, there was only a faint smear of pigment.

She stepped toward it, transfixed.

"It isn't done," Maboroshi said behind her.

She turned. He stood close—close enough that she felt the warmth radiating from his chest, though they didn't touch.

"Because you told me not to finish it," he said. "Until you returned."

Her voice barely made sound. "I don't remember that."

His fingers hovered over her wrist—light, barely there. Not a touch. A question.

"I wanted you to choose how you would be remembered."

And for just a second, the image's lips seemed to move.

The Mourning Portrait