Ansel's body trembled violently as he tried to push himself up from the cold, cracked floor of the room. His breath was ragged, his chest rising and falling in desperate gasps. The world around him seemed to warp, the edges of reality twisting like a warped reflection in a broken mirror. He could still hear the voice of the statue echoing through his mind, a hum that vibrated deep in his core.
"You are already part of it."
It was true. He could feel it now, deep within him. The pulse of the building, the rhythm of its walls, was now part of his heartbeat. His veins seemed to hum with the same frequency. His thoughts? Those were no longer his own. Every whisper in the shadows, every flicker of movement in the dark, was influencing him. It was suffocating. A thousand hands gripping at the edges of his mind.
He staggered to his feet, his legs unsteady, barely able to carry him. The room stretched before him, the shadows crawling across the floor like tendrils of darkness, moving with purpose. His skin was crawling, itching, as if something inside him was shifting—growing, changing. His hands were no longer his own. They looked foreign, as if the skin was peeling away, revealing something else beneath.
He looked down at his hands in horror. They were wrong. The fingers were longer, thinner, like they belonged to something not quite human. The veins on his hands were too pronounced, like ropes of dark, twisted matter. He flexed his fingers, and the sensation that followed was… wrong.
Ansel stumbled backward, his mind racing.
"No," he whispered. "This isn't me. This can't be happening…"
But the building answered in a voice that wasn't his own, echoing through the room like it came from the walls themselves.
"It's already begun. You are becoming one with us."
A sharp, stabbing pain shot through his chest. His vision blurred, his body shaking uncontrollably. He fell to his knees, clutching his head as the building's voice resonated deeper within him. It wasn't just in his mind anymore. He could feel it in his blood. He could feel the walls, the floor beneath him, pulsing with the same rhythm that had taken over his body. The same rhythm that had rewritten his very existence.
The hallway had always been more than a place. It had been a force, an entity with an agenda. And now, that force was him.
He wanted to scream, to fight, to tear his skin off, and claw his way out of this nightmare. But his hands didn't listen. His body didn't respond the way it should.
"You are a part of the story now," the voice continued, each word crawling through his skin like a thousand crawling insects. "The rewrite is inevitable. There is no escape. Not for you. Not for anyone."
The room around him seemed to shift, the shadows darkening as if reacting to his fear. They twisted into shapes, human shapes, figures that seemed to be half-formed, their eyes voids of blackness. They moved closer to him, their forms phasing in and out of reality, as though they weren't fully grounded in this world.
Ansel felt their cold presence surround him. They were reaching for him, their ghostly hands grazing his skin. His entire body convulsed, his muscles locking in place as he struggled to move, to breathe.
He was becoming like them.
The shadows circled tighter, their voices whispering his name, growing louder, more insistent.
"You will be part of us," they murmured in unison, their voices a haunting chorus that seemed to rise and fall in time with the building's pulse. "You will join the rewriting."
A sudden image flashed through Ansel's mind. The hallway. The rooms. The faces he had seen. The bodies of those who had come before him, their forms twisted and warped by the building's insidious influence. Their eyes had been empty, vacant, as though they had been hollowed out and replaced with something else. Something darker.
No.
Ansel's breath caught in his throat as a terrible thought struck him like a bolt of lightning.
They weren't gone.
The people who had disappeared—they weren't dead. They had been rewritten, remade into something the building could control. Something that was no longer human.
He was becoming one of them.
His fingers twitched, uncontrollably. His vision blurred again, the darkness creeping in at the edges of his sight. The pain in his chest deepened, growing sharper as he felt the building's will stretch through him, like invisible strings pulling at his very soul. He couldn't fight it. His mind screamed for him to resist, but it was becoming harder and harder to hold onto his humanity. To hold onto who he had been. The building had already taken so much from him.
The shadows closed in on him, their touch cold, their whispers deafening. He couldn't breathe. His chest felt like it was being crushed by the weight of a thousand invisible hands.
"You are one with us," they repeated. "You are part of the rewrite."
His heart raced. It was happening. He was slipping.
But then—just as the darkness was about to swallow him whole—he heard something else. A faint voice, struggling to reach him through the haze.
It was her.
Mira.
Her name pierced through the chaos in his mind like a needle through cloth, sharp and clear. Mira. She had been here too. She had survived this place. She knew something.
Something that might be able to pull him back.
Ansel's mind, twisted and broken, latched onto her name like a lifeline in the dark.
"Mira…" he whispered, his voice hoarse, barely a breath.
The shadows faltered for a moment, their cold hands hesitating as if they recognized the name. They seemed to shrink back, their presence wavered.
Mira had been the key all along. He didn't know how, didn't know what she had done to survive—but he would find her. He had to.
Ansel's internal battle grows more desperate as he slips further into the building's grasp. Will he be able to reclaim what's left of himself before he is lost completely? Or will the rewrite consume him entirely? It's time to bring Mira back into focus, as their fates seem more intertwined than ever. Guys what do you think will happen?