Date: 1923

  Era: Taisho-era Japan

  Requestor: Haruka Imai, age 19

  Haruka Imai had once been the pride of her okiya, the most promising maiko in all of Gion. She moved like mist across a moonlit lake, her voice soft as falling snow. Clients adored her. Elders praised her. Even the strict matron, who rarely allowed herself warmth, would smile when Haruka performed.

  But brilliance is a cruel light. And in its shadow, envy bloomed.

  Aiko, her senior, had once held that same favor. But as Haruka rose, Aiko dimmed. What began as polite rivalry soured into whispered lies. She sowed distrust in quiet corners, spun rumors into silk threads that snared Haruka in disgrace. Then, when poison in her tea took away her voice

  The very essence of her craft

  Haruka was discarded like a broken ornament and sold to a nobleman with an appetite for fragile, ruined things.

  She escaped months later, silent and scarred, her tongue severed, her kimono in tatters. She wandered Kyoto’s back alleys barefoot, beauty hidden beneath grime and bruises.

  The city that once applauded her now looked away.

  On the seventh night, beneath the collapsed eaves of a long-burned theater, Haruka found a shattered vanity mirror among the ashes. Something shimmered in its fractured glass, something watching.

  She stared.

  Her reflection blinked, though she had not. Its eyes glowed ember-red.

  From behind her in the reflection, a woman appeared.

  She wore red—ceremonial and ancient—and held a small plush rabbit stitched delicately with red thread. Its button eyes gleamed like obsidian tears.

  The mirror did not shatter. It opened.

  Ink bled across the dusty glass, curling into a question.

  “Do you wish for revenge?”

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  Haruka could not speak. But her eyes glistened, and her nod was steady. Her tears hit the glass like raindrops on still water. The pact was sealed in silence.

  The woman stepped through the mirror as if it were a veil of water. Her feet made no sound. Her presence was calm, but terrible in its certainty. She took Haruka’s trembling hands in hers and looked deep into the hollow places grief had carved.

  “You don’t have to speak for vengeance,” she whispered. “Your silence is enough.”

  A thread of glowing crimson slipped from Haruka’s throat and wrapped itself around the woman’s fingers.

  The rabbit plush seemed to inhale, the light weaving gently into its stitched chest. Haruka’s soul was bound in soft velvet and thread, safe, but not yet at rest.

  That night, Aiko bathed beneath lantern light, her reflection hazy in rising steam. She leaned toward the mirror, admiring the face she had painted so carefully—until the reflection smiled without her. Its head turned. Her heart stopped.

  The voice came from nowhere, or everywhere. Not loud. Not angry. Just patient.

  “Did you steal her voice… or was it always louder than yours?”

  The walls around her blurred, then rippled like water before melting into pale silk. She found herself back on stage—the same one where she had once stolen Haruka’s performance as her own. She tried to call out, but no sound emerged. Her limbs moved stiffly, out of rhythm, as if she were a marionette with fraying strings.

  The music began. A delicate melody, familiar and haunting, wound from a distant music box.

  Lily appeared then, draped in an old, discarded kimono. Her eyes watched with quiet sorrow. The rabbit plush peeked from her sleeve, its expression unchanged, its stitched tears catching the flickering stage light.

  An audience gathered—faceless, silent, waiting.

  Aiko danced. And danced. Her joints cracked, her bones groaned, her body screamed even when her voice could not. The melody did not stop. She collapsed in a heap of ruined grace, silence pressing down like the weight of water.

  The next morning, they found her hanging in her dressing room. Around her, dozens of porcelain dolls, each painted with her face. Each mouth sewn shut with red thread.

  Haruka’s body was never found. Some claimed they saw a young geisha with no voice slip into the mirror of a forgotten temple, followed closely by a woman in red.

  And somewhere, when the plush rabbit is left alone too long, it softly weeps.

  Before vanishing, Lily whispered into the cracked vanity:

  “Vengeance is not healing. It is the silence after the scream.”

  When the world ignores your screams...

  I will hear you.

  If your hatred burns bright enough...

  I will come.

  But revenge comes at a cost...

  And no one escapes the fire.

  Case : closed

  Status : Soul in transit.