Jade had been scouring the city for three days, obsessed with a specific kind of darkness. She didn’t want "midnight breeze" or "glittering onyx." She wanted a finish so flat it absorbed the light around it.

But the shopkeeper wasn’t joking about the reflection. The next morning, Jade held her hand up to the sunlight. Usually, her polished nails would catch a glint of gold, but these stayed stubbornly dark. When she reached for her coffee, it felt like her fingertips were tiny black holes, dragging her hand toward the mug with more weight than usual.

She finally found it in a dusty corner of a boutique called The Inkwell . The bottle was heavy, frosted glass, labeled simply: .

"Are you sure?" the shopkeeper asked, her voice like dry leaves. "Matte black doesn't reflect anything. Not even your own mistakes."