The night, just three days before the wedding, was stifling. The air hung thick with a humid, funereal weight.
Takeshi stood before the ancient storehouse situated behind Aya’s family estate. He had been tasked with organizing the heirlooms for their new life. Deep within the dust-choked gloom, wedged between stacked nagamochi chests, he found it.
“…What is this?”
A pair of mirrors, swathed in heavy, archaic cloth.
As he stripped away the fabric, two intricately carved wooden frames emerged, their detail so precise it felt malevolent. On one, a dragon ascended toward the heavens; on the other, a phoenix spread its wings in a jagged arc. The glass surfaces seemed to have spent centuries absorbing the darkness, emitting only a dull, light-eating luster.
Takeshi took the dragon; Aya took the phoenix.
As if drawn by a gravitational pull, they each raised a mirror to face their own reflections. In that instant, the world warped.
In Takeshi’s vision, the reflection of his own face began to liquefy, melting into the soft, feminine contours of Aya’s silhouette. From Aya’s perspective, her own image shifted, hardening into the rugged, masculine jawline of Takeshi.
“Ah…”
A soundless breath escaped them.
A violent vertigo, like an iron stake driven through the brain, scrambled their senses. Equilibrium vanished. The very concepts of up, down, left, and right dissolved into a gray mist. Takeshi felt a primal terror—as if the “soul” were being drained through a psychological valve at the bottom of his physical vessel.
Blackout. Their consciousnesses plummeted into the lightless void of the night.
The following morning.
When Takeshi regained consciousness, the first thing he felt was a fundamental shift in gravity.
Normally, there was a familiar mass to his limbs when he threw back the covers—a solid, bone-deep certainty in his joints. Now, that was gone. In its place was an unnatural “softness” so acute that even the weight of the silk duvet felt abrasive against his skin.
(…What is this sensation?)
He tried to open his eyes, but the sheer length and density of his eyelashes startled him. Every blink felt heavy, as if his lids were brushing against downy feathers.
Takeshi tried to sit up, but the mechanics of his torque were broken. He attempted to engage his core—the “snap” of muscle he had relied on for years—but the body refused to respond. His center of mass had drifted.
When he finally managed to rise, he realized his vantage point was ten centimeters lower than usual. Then, a violent physical dissonance struck his chest. Beneath the fabric of the nightgown, gravity was focusing on two specific points, pulling at the skin with a subtle, insistent weight.
Trembling, Takeshi reached for his own chest. He froze before the scream could leave his throat.
“…!?”
His fingertips did not meet a hard, flat pectoral wall. They met a soft, elastic, yet undeniably heavy displacement of flesh.
His hands themselves had been replaced. The rugged, calloused knuckles were gone. In their place were slender, pale fingers with rose-colored nails, meticulously groomed—the beautiful hands of his fiancée, Aya.
“Hi… ah, aah…”
Takeshi recoiled at the sound of his own throat.
It wasn’t his gravelly baritone. It was a high, crystalline soprano—the voice of the woman he loved. The fact that this sound was being generated by the vibration of his own larynx felt like a physical violation.
He crawled toward the vanity mirror in the corner of the room. The glass revealed the truth.
“Aya…”
Disheveled hair. Moist, trembling eyes. A face of peerless beauty contorted in a mask of terror.
It was unmistakably Aya. Yet, deep within those pupils, his own psyche was undergoing a violent rejection. His brain screamed, “I am a man,” while the visual input cold-bloodedly retorted, “You are a woman.” The perverse sensation of touching what he thought was his own skin, only to find the flesh of another, was too much.
Takeshi doubled over and vomited the entire contents of his stomach onto the floor.
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