The air in the backroom was a stagnant mire, worlds away from the saccharine facade of the cafe floor. It reeked of iron, stale perfume, and something underlying it all—the scent of terminal decay.
“Yuya-sama,” Mariko whispered, her voice no longer a servant’s, but a command that vibrated with a jagged, desperate gravity. “Do you know what it’s like? To feel the world’s colors bleed out of your skin, day by day? To feel the very elasticity of your soul being dragged down by the sheer weight of time?”
“I… I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Yuya stammered. He tried to pull his arm away, but her grip was an iron shackle. Her fingers, despite their skeletal appearance, possessed a terrifying compressive force. “Let me go. Sato is waiting.”
“Sato sees nothing. No one sees anything but the frills,” she hissed, stepping into his light. “But you… you have such a surplus of life. Your pulse is so loud, it’s deafening. Your skin… the tension of it is breathtaking. It’s a waste on someone who takes it for granted.”
Before he could shout, Mariko reached into the pocket of her apron and produced a small, obsidian mirror—the twin to the one in the legends. She didn’t look at it. She forced it in front of Yuya’s eyes.
“Look at your ‘now.’ Because it is about to become my ‘forever.'”
The world inverted.
Yuya felt a violent, vacuum-like suction behind his navel. It was as if his very mass—not just his weight, but the essence of his physical presence—was being liquidated and siphoned through his pores. He watched in the mirror as his own reflection began to wither in real-time. The luster of his eyes dimmed like a dying star, and the vibrant tan of his skin paled into a sickly, translucent grey.
Conversely, Mariko began to transform. The deep canyons of her wrinkles smoothed over as if filled by an invisible tide. Her slumped, arthritic posture corrected itself, her spine lengthening with a series of wet, audible pops.
“Stop… stop it!”
Yuya tried to scream, but the frequency of his voice was shifting. The air in his lungs felt thinner, his chest cavity shrinking, while a foreign, heavy exhaustion began to settle into his marrow.
The transition was silent and absolute.
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