Chapter One
The Mirror That Smiled
I've always believed that some things watch us long before we ever notice them.
Maybe it's a room that makes you uneasy without knowing why, or a stranger's gaze that lingers half a second too long. Or maybe it's something bigger an object, a house, a piece of the world that's been waiting quietly for years, pretending it's just another thing in the background until the moment you finally step into its shadow.
That's what the house felt like.
Like it had been waiting for me.
I wasn't supposed to come here. The letter from the lawyer had arrived three weeks earlier, heavy with formality and dust. You are the sole inheritor of the estate of Miriam Kess. The name meant nothing to me. I'd never heard of her.
I almost threw it away until my eyes caught on the final line, written in smaller, crooked letters at the bottom. It wasn't typed. It wasn't official. It read: Bring warm clothes. The sea speaks too much.
That was the part that stayed with me. Not the inheritance, not the name, not the location. Just that sentence, curling in my mind like smoke.
The road to the coast grew narrower the farther I went, until it was little more than a ribbon of cracked asphalt stitched between cliffs and gray water. The air was wet, tasting faintly of rust, and the fog thickened until the world beyond my headlights became a smear of shifting shapes.
The house emerged from that fog the way a figure might step from a dream slowly, without sound, until it was simply there. Three stories of weathered wood, its edges softened by time, its windows clouded and blind. The front steps sagged as though they'd been waiting too long for anyone to walk them.
When I pushed the door open, the air that spilled out was cold and faintly metallic, as if the place had been breathing in the sea for years and was now breathing it back into me.
Inside, the silence was so complete I could hear the small, tired creak of the floorboards under my shoes. No photographs lined the walls. No furniture stood waiting. Just empty rooms with pale light cutting through the dust. It felt like a place that had erased itself, room by room.
I should have explored the ground floor first.
But I didn't.
I went straight for the stairs, my hand trailing the banister polished smooth by hands long gone. The second floor was as bare as the first only a narrow hallway stretching into shadow. At the end of it, half-hidden, was a door.
The knob was cold, startlingly so. A tiny prickle ran down my spine. Be careful in the attic, the lawyer had told me. The words came back now, uninvited.
The door resisted at first, then gave way with a sound like something sighing.
The attic was dim, lit only by a single round window, a pale circle against the gloom. Dust hung in the air like it had been waiting centuries for this one shaft of light. And in that light, at the far wall, stood the mirror.
It was taller than I was, framed in dark wood that twisted into vines and leaves, the details so fine I thought I saw faces hidden in the patterns—tiny, sorrowful, almost pleading.
I stepped closer. My reflection stepped too, exactly in time. Same pale skin. Same dark hair. Same faint shadow under my eyes.
And then… not the same.
I frowned. She smiled.
It wasn't quick, or kind. It was deliberate slow enough to make me aware of every muscle that shifted. Her eyes caught the light in a way mine didn't.
I felt a strange recognition I couldn't name, a familiarity that made my chest tighten. She lifted her hand and pressed her palm to the glass. I didn't lift mine.
The glass rippled, a small shiver across its surface.
A cold breath swept past me sharp with salt, but threaded with something faintly coppery, like the air after biting your tongue.
In that moment, the mirror didn't feel like a mirror at all. It felt like an opening. A threshold. A thing that had been here long before me, patient and unblinking.
Her lips moved. No sound, just the shape of the word: Eira.
My name.
I should have run. Should have slammed the door.
But I didn't.
Because that smile… it was my mother's.