Une vie à t'aimer

Today was Louis' Gommage Day.

In Lumière, everyone knew what it meant. It was a chilling, inescapable rhythm that pulsed through the city, marking time not by seasons or holidays, but by disappearances. The thrum of anxiety that accompanied each passing year intensified as you approached your last birthday, a morbid countdown to an inevitable vanishing act.

Every person, without exception, simply ceased to be.

Harry had lived his entire life in the shadow of this reality. He'd seen it countless times: friends, neighbours, even his own parents - all gone, swallowed by the insatiable whim of The Paintress.

She was an enigmatic, terrifying entity, an omnipresent dread perched on her distant island. She was always dormant, a silent, ominous sentinel. But then, on the dreaded Gommage Day, she would rise, brush in hand, to paint the fateful number, a countdown that had started at 100 and was now at 33, erasing another life from existence.

Gommage Day. The very name was a curse whispered on the wind, a day universally loathed above all others. It was the day you turned thirty-three. The day you disappeared.

And for Louis, today was that day.