"They say a mirror never lies. But this one in front of me. it will not so much as acknowledge me existing."
***
It started as a whisper.
Not the sort that rustles your ear or gives you goosebumps. It was a silence sharp enough to cut. A stillness which folded back on itself, like a memory no one would ever remember.
I was eleven when I first beheld it—the Bathory Mirror. An old, blood-stained relic locked away in a corner of Austria National Museum's archives. I had not meant to wander so far. I was just a lost girl seeking something beyond fear.
They said it was from Transylvania. 16th century. Commissioned by Countess Elizabeth Bathory—The Blood Countess.
But that wasn't true.
It wasn't created for her. It was her.
And now, thirteen years later, I was back. Same vault. Same cursed mirror. Still no reflection.
I was frozen in the dim hallway lighting, grasping my museum intern badge like it was a shield of protection. If I got to catalog this mirror, I'd get a full-time position at last. A tiny piece of security.
"Clara, exhibit room closes in five," came a voice on my belt radio. I didn't respond.
I moved closer.
The mirror was not smashed or dusty or old-looking—it was simply. off. Its face gleamed like it remembered me. Not nostalgically. It was intimate. Personal. Like it had once observed me asleep. Like it still did.
I raised my hand. My fingers hovered over the glass—no heat, no chill. Just a pull. A gravitational force that didn't exist.
And then I saw her.
Not my reflection. A girl in red.
Black curls. Skin like bone polished to shine. Eyes like blood swirled into milk. She smiled—cruelly.
"You're late, Clara," she called to her on the other side.
I took a sharp breath and fell backward. My heart beat like a caged bird. But the mirror didn't flutter. The girl didn't disappear. She simply stared.
"Who are you?" I whispered.
She tilted her head. "A version of you who never forgot."
Then she was gone.
Just like that.
The mirror blanked out. Not a reflection. Just absence.
Then came the noise.
Such as ripping paper underwater. Gentle. Exact.
I turned.
A man stood by the iron gate at the end of the vault. Tall. Angular. Black coat, unbuttoned. A burgundy scarf around his neck, curling like dried blood.
I saw his eyes and winced.
Because I recognized that face.
Not in life. I had never talked to him. But I had sketched him—thousands of times. In notebooks. On napkins. From dreams I never told anyone about.
He moved closer. "Clara Elisabeth Sommers."
He had a voice like he was remembering things for you.
"Who… are you?" My voice wavered.
"A man who recalls what you've forgotten," he explained. "And what you need to become to get through what is to come."
Behind me was humming the mirror. Yes—humming. As if it sang in reverse.
Then it opened.
Not broken. Unsealed.
Slit of darkness unzipped down the middle, like an eye blinking the wrong way. Through it—red light. Candles floated. Whispers curled like fog.
I didn't budge. My feet were frozen to the cold hard floor of the vault. The rational part of my brain screamed to run, to get security, to do anything but stand paralyzed by the impossible.
But another level of me, further back and apparently beyond my control, had me in a grip of fascination. It was a morbid curiosity, yes, but it was also a strange form of belonging, as if this bizarre confrontation was simply a piece of a puzzle falling into place and clarifying a pattern by which I had unknowingly lived my entire life.
The room in the vault grew heavy with air, heavy with the scent of ozone and something perfumey, like old incense and a slightly metallic note.
Each beat of my heart was like a drum on my chest, emphasizing the odd silence swallowing where I expected to hear museum noises.
He was a man—Gustav, his name slipped effortlessly into my thoughts as though it had always resided there—extending his hand.
His fingers were long and pale, his nails so perfectly trimmed they looked almost unreal. There was a scent that lingered around him—like aged parchment laced with the essence of autumn, something that carried both the promise of decay and the whisper of renewal.
The air itself seemed to waver near him, as if reality bent ever so slightly in his presence, distorting the edges of my vision.
His black coat drank in the faint light, casting him as an even darker silhouette against the vault's deep shadows—a figure seemingly sculpted from midnight.
And his eyes—when they met mine—were impossibly ancient, steeped in a knowledge that felt older than time.
It wasn't judgment I saw there, but something far more unsettling: calm, relentless understanding that stripped me bare.
"Clara. Seven versions of you are lost in the Mirror Aeon. If you don't claim them. someone else will."
The words didn't just linger in the air—they reverberated through me, deep into my bones, rattling loose forgotten fears and the faded edges of old dreams.
Seven versions of me?
It sounded absurd, yet the notion took root with eerie ease, slipping into place like a truth I'd always known but never dared to name.
The cavernous vault caught his voice and gave it power, turning it into something more than sound—something final.
It didn't feel like a warning. It felt like a verdict.
A truth that had always been waiting for me to hear it. His words carried weight, the kind you couldn't shrug off.
They demanded more than disbelief. They demanded reckoning.
"Versions?" I asked. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"A man who recalls what you've forgotten," he explained. "And what you need to become to get through what is to come."
He didn't even flinch at my outburst.
His gaze stayed steady—deep, unsettling—as though he were looking past my confusion into something far older, something buried deep within me. It was as if he could see a life I hadn't lived yet, a truth too vast for me to grasp.
His calm wasn't comforting. It was chilling. Because that kind of certainty only comes from someone who knows how the story ends.
The air between us grew heavy, saturated with silence that felt ancient, dense with the weight of secrets too patient, too practiced.
It felt like every forgotten whisper, every untold story, every memory I'd lost—or hadn't yet lived—was pressing in, guiding me toward a decision that had already been waiting for me.
"Bathory didn't die. She left. So did you."
The mirror throbbed. The crimson light deepened, casting the vault in a throbbing, blood-tinged glow—like the heartbeat of something vast and unseen.
The whispers grew louder, no longer soft murmurs but a storm of voices, ancient and insistent, like wind tearing through brittle leaves.
They spoke of forgotten times, of lives that had come and gone, of choices etched into history. The candles inside the mirror, once just distant flickers, now seemed alive—flames that swayed with intent, as if they recognized me, as if they were calling me forward with a dark, seductive pull.
The air thickened, heavy with a building tension, and a strange scent crept in—sweet and suffocating, like bruised lilies steeped in old blood. It was awful, and yet... I couldn't look away.
Couldn't move.
The mirror's surface stirred—not like water, but like darkness itself had been touched, and for the first time, it moved.
And deep inside that crimson corridor—I saw her.
La muchacha en rojo.
Not me.
She smiled. And mouthed two words:
"Rescue me…"
The mirror was starting to shut.
Three seconds to choose.
Stay here—safe, logical, broken.
Or trailed after a stranger who had my entire name on his lips. Whose breath reeked of burnt past. Into a world which had me ripped in two.
I stepped closer.
Into the mirror.
***