The room was silent. Still. The air was so still, it felt like time had stopped breathing.
Four chairs faced the mirror, evenly spaced across a gray floor. Nothing else. No books, no dolls, no whispers.
Mikael stepped forward first. His reflection didn't move.
It blinked.
"That's not… me," he said quietly.
"No," Arielle replied. "It's who you were before."
The mirror didn't show them as they were now. It showed their true selves—raw, unedited. Fractured, maybe, but whole in ways they had forgotten.
Mikael's reflection had scars he didn't recognize—memories rewritten. Pain he had covered with fake smiles.
Elise stepped beside him. Her reflection wasn't composed. It was crying. Angry. Honest.
"I forgot how much I used to feel," she whispered.
"That's why they rewrote you," Arielle said. "Because you felt too much."
Lina didn't say anything. Her reflection was facing away.
"…Why won't she look at me?" she asked.
"Because you stopped looking at yourself a long time ago," Arielle answered gently.
Then Arielle approached the mirror.
Her reflection was missing.
No face. No body. Just a shadow in the shape of her.
The others turned to her in confusion.
She smiled—not sadly, but knowingly.
"I wasn't supposed to be in this story. I wasn't part of the rewrite. I was the reminder."
Mikael's eyes widened. "Arielle…"
"You needed someone who remembered. Who could guide you back here. That was me."
The mirror shimmered. The chairs behind them filled with pages—millions of them—torn, scribbled, erased, rewritten. Their stories.
"All this time…" Elise murmured. "The Dollhouse wasn't trapping us."
"It was waiting," Arielle said. "For us to accept our unfinished selves."
The chairs weren't prisons.
They were pens.
Seats for the real authors.
Mikael turned to the others. "We don't have to be perfect."
Lina nodded. "We don't have to forget."
Elise stepped forward. "We don't have to be dolls."
Together, they sat.
And the mirror cracked.
Not broken.
Opened.