La Maldicion Del Amor Verdadero | Fresh

"The first woman who called me back. In 1692. She performed the same ritual you did. She loved me with all her heart. And I... I could not love her. The curse forbids it."

I understood then. True love, in this dark fable, was not a union. It was a parasite . The beloved does not love back because the curse feeds on unrequited devotion. It is a machine that burns one soul at a time to keep a dead man walking. I could have accepted my fate. Many had before me. The monastery's crypt held the skeletons of thirty-seven women, each with a silver ring on her finger and a smile on her skull. They had loved Sebastián until their bodies gave out. They had died happy, if you consider starvation while staring at a beautiful face to be happiness.

The ritual was simple, as the most terrible things often are. A lock of my hair. A drop of my blood. A kiss pressed to the cold lips of the portrait at the thirteenth hour of the night. I whispered his name three times, and the air grew thick as honey left to rot. La Maldicion Del Amor Verdadero

On the night of the full moon, I did not tell him I loved him. Instead, I held a small hand mirror to his face and forced him to look at his own reflection.

And he screamed.

He looked.

One night, I found him standing before a mirror. He was not looking at his own reflection. He was looking through it, at something on the other side. "The first woman who called me back

I did not fall in love with a man.