Mira tumbled through.
Not falling exactly—just unmaking, her body peeled through light and sound, spun out like threads unraveling from fabric. Her limbs weren't limbs. Her mouth wasn't a mouth. She was a sensation, a memory disintegrating as it reached for itself.
Then: impact.
She landed hard—on her side, ribs striking stone.
Stone?
The ground beneath her was not the floorboards of the house, but something colder. Rough. Wet. She opened her eyes and found herself lying in a circular chamber carved from black rock, the ceiling a perfect dome of mirror-like obsidian that reflected her sprawled form from above.
All around her, tall archways led off into darkness, each one lined with mirrors—some broken, some fogged, some rippling as if alive.
The air was dense. Not with moisture or heat—but with memory.
She could feel it brushing against her skin like static: the echo of old moments. Forgotten touch. Swallowed cries.
Something in this place remembered her—even if she didn't remember it.
A voice echoed across the chamber. Not loud, not close. But inside.
"You left me here…"
Mira stood, unsteady, cradling her arm. The bruise from before had deepened, webbing up her forearm like roots of some buried tree. A tree growing from inside her.
"You locked the door and threw away the key. But doors never forget. Neither do I."
Across the chamber, one of the mirrors rippled. Then another. Faces blinked in and out of the glass—children, teenagers, adults. All versions of Mira. Some crying. Some screaming. Some staring, wide-eyed and silent, mouthing the same word over and over.
Myrah.
The name dug under her skin.
Myrah.
She took a step back, and the mirrored dome above her shimmered. Her reflection split—fractured into twelve, twenty, fifty shards, each one a different version of herself. Some were injured. Some were pale. One was bleeding from the eyes.
They all looked down at her.
And then, in a single collective movement, they smiled.
"Stop it," Mira whispered. Her voice trembled.
The central mirror in the dome cracked—a hairline fracture, snaking outward like lightning. And with that crack came a wave of sound.
Children crying. A woman singing. Her mother screaming. A voice whispering a lullaby:
"In the hollow where secrets lie,
Forget the truth, let memory die..."
"No," Mira said, louder now. "This isn't real."
One of the archways flared with pale blue light. At its end, a door stood—tall, metal, ancient. Covered in handprints.
Some small. Some her size. Some inhuman.
She didn't want to walk toward it, but her feet moved anyway.
The door pulsed once as she approached.
Behind her, the chamber groaned—as if the walls were sighing in grief.
Mira raised a hand to the door.
It was cold. Wet. It beat like a heart.
A memory surged through her body the moment she touched it:
Her as a child, pressed against the attic floor, listening to the heartbeat below. Her mother screaming at her to never go near it. Her own voice whispering:
"But I can hear her. She's crying. She sounds like me."
The door clicked.
Opened.
Darkness inside.
But not empty.
At the far end, a figure stood.
Back turned. Silent.
Long black hair matted with dust. The curve of a shoulder Mira recognized like the shape of her own bones.
The figure turned slowly.
It was her.
Or… it had once been.
Pale skin. Eyes hollowed. Mouth stitched shut with shadow.
A single tear fell from the creature's eye and vanished into ash before hitting the ground.
Mira gasped.
The stitched mouth moved, despite the seams.
"You buried me."
And then all the mirrors in the chamber behind her shattered at once, and Mira screamed—
—and woke up.
On the hallway floor.
Back in the house.
The mirror above her was cracked.
This time, the blood was real.
And it was hers.