The altar candles hardened air into amber. As Ayla's nails scraped the joint coffin's seams, she smelled thirty-year-old pine resin—identical to Lucas' joint lubricant. Odile's wedding-style lab gown lay inside, its collar iris embroidery bleeding, where corpses should rest hung only the rusted sakura pendant—chain break crusted with Lucas' last-night wound scab.
(The lid groaned open. Ancestral portraits wept cerulean tears, pooling into modified curse arrays)
"Move!" Lucas shoved her ribs-cracking hard. The chandelier's crash against his shoulder echoed his twenty-year-old branding sizzle. Ayla lunged to find black rose roots bursting through his shirt, thorn tips phosphorescing.
Coffin inscriptions bled through: "Love's supreme curse, born 1988.3.17"—Lucas' mechanical heart's birthdate, twelve years pre-Ayla. The pendant levitated, chain stubs growing filament tentacles around her wrist—inner engraving matching his spinal sensor code: No.21.
"Don't..." Lucas' cerulean-bloodied fingers covered her eyes—fingertips scalding, palm glacial. "...look..."
Coughing seized him. Ayla caught his slumping body, her palm prints suctioned into his chest wound. Lucas finger-painted her palm with dying strength: "Keep hating this powerless me."
(A music box jammed behind the altar, warping into Odile's lab lullaby)
Blue tears reversed mid-air, coalescing into young Odile's hologram—pressing the pendant into teenage Lucas' spinal incision. But the boy on the operating table wore Eric's youthful face! Pendant filaments pierced Ayla's wrist veins, memory deluging her—Mother holding infant Ayla by lab windows, Odile implanting fifteen-year-old Lucas with mechanical heart labeled "Vessel No.21".
"Finally see?" Eric's voice bled through tear-streams. His shoe-toe flipped the coffin gown aside, exposing a hidden projector. "You twin irises are just her longest-cultivated mold."
Lucas' mechanical pupils contracted. He shredded pendant tentacles, cerulean blood spraying the gown—droplets reversing into his body to form Mother's specimen code: No.21. Ayla's temples throbbed—the pendant's holographic core revealed a micro incubation pod, its floating infant blending their features.
"Run..." Lucas gripped her neckbone, imprinting his fingerprints. "...inverted thorns..."
His heart flatlined. Blue tears vaporized. Portraits exploded. Eric's watch chain snared Ayla's ankle—the dissolving photo inside shedding Odile's lover's face to reveal pre-prosthetic Lucas.
Ayla bit her tongue, blood smearing the pendant's pod. Fluid boiled—the infant aged rapidly: twenty-year-old Lucas' face morphed into Eric's elderly visage.
The altar floor collapsed. Odile's laughter rotted with roses: "Now know why your birthdays span twelve years?"
Falling into darkness, Ayla clutched Lucas' icy hand. The pendant chain fused their wrists in symbiosis as new bloody script oozed: "Curse perpetuates through love reborn."