The dining room was a tomb, and they were its sole, horrified mourners. Time had ceased to have meaning. There was only the silent, dusty tableau of their own deaths, a perfect, three dimensional photograph of their failure. Lio stared at his own still face, feeling a profound and dizzying disconnect from reality. Sera was on her knees, her breath coming in shallow, silent gasps.
Ira stood rigid, his newfound lucidity a cruel curse, forcing him to witness this waking nightmare with clear, unclouded eyes.
It was into this absolute, suffocating silence that a voice spoke.
"You're looking in the wrong place."
It was Mina's voice. It was perfectly clear, impossibly close, yet it came from nowhere and everywhere at once.
It was a thought that had found its way into the air of the room.
Lio's head snapped up, his eyes darting around the dusty space. "Mina?" he croaked, his voice raw.
"Where are you? Are you here?"
The voice, calm and untroubled, continued. "I was never really 'here'," it said. "Not like you. Look at the chair. My chair."
Their collective gaze was drawn to the fourth, empty chair at the table. The small, red woolen mitten sat on the seat, a lonely punctuation mark in the story of their demise.
"There's no body for me," the voice explained, without a hint of sadness.
"There never is. You can't leave behind what you never had."
A pause, as if to let the impossible statement settle.
"I was never born."
The words hung in the dead air, both a complete absurdity and a perfect, horrifying explanation.
"What…" Ira began, his voice trembling, "What are you?"
"A memory," Mina's voice replied simply. "At first, just a small one.
The memory of a hope you had in the first loop.
The wish for a guide. The ghost of a daughter you both wished you'd had more time with.
Every time you walked the circle, every time you failed and began again, you left a little more of that memory behind in the world. After a while… all those little pieces learned to walk. They learned to talk. They learned my name."
Lio thought of her strange pronouncements, her conversations with an unseen friend she called 'He'—the consciousness of the world itself. He thought of her immunity to the Hollows, her serene acceptance of the impossible.
She wasn't a child weathering the storm; she was a part of the storm, a sentient echo created by their own repeated suffering. She was the part of them that was allowed to remember.
"You were our guide," Lio breathed, the pieces clicking into place with a terrible, final clarity.
"I tried to be," her voice said, and for the first time, there was a hint of something like melancholy in it. "I tried to show you the cracks in the prison. The Echo Town, the Mirror House… all the places you had been before. I tried to lead you here. To this room. This is the place you always get stuck. The place you have to see before you can choose."
Sera, who had been kneeling silently, finally broke. She let out a long, shuddering sob, not of shock, but of confession. "I knew," she whispered to the empty room, her voice thick with tears.
"I knew you weren't… mine. Not from my body. I felt it the first time I held your hand. But you were a child of our journey. You were real to me." She clutched the red mitten to her chest.
"You were my daughter."
Mina's voice was gentle.
"I know. That's why it was so hard to leave this time."
Her voice began to fade, growing distant, like a radio signal losing its frequency. "Seeing this room isn't the end," it said, the words becoming faint whispers. "It's the beginning. Now… you can choose…"
The voice vanished. The silence that rushed back in to fill the void was heavier, more profound than before. It was the silence of absolute, unbearable truth. Lio looked from his weeping mother to his horrified father, then to the empty chair where his sister, the beautiful, impossible mirage of his family's grief, had once sat. He stared at the red mitten, the only physical proof she had left behind, the tangible remnant of the child who never was.