The moment the words flashed — She's here. She never left. Ella… it's your turn. — the floor rumbled beneath them like a heart giving one last defiant beat.
Then silence.
Not just the absence of sound, but the full erasure of it. No ambient hum, no breath, no heartbeat. It was as if the room had swallowed sound whole, sealing it into its mirrored ribs.
Elara felt it before she fully registered it — the locket in her hand heating, pulsing like it had grown a second heartbeat of its own. Rhythmic. Insistent. Alive.
She gripped it tighter.
No one moved. No one dared.
Harper's lips parted, her brows furrowed in confusion as she tried to speak — but no voice came. Her mouth moved in panicked silence. Kemi flailed, tapping rapidly on her tablet, which flickered with static — liquid, corrupted, bleeding across the screen like ink soaking through water.
They weren't alone.
But it wasn't just a presence.
It was a return.
The mirrored walls flickered, not with their reflections, but with memories. Grainy footage, distorted by time. Home videos. A child's birthday party — balloons sagging, cake half-cut. Two girls playing on a sunlit lawn. One was unmistakably Elara, her smile wide, her hair tied back in a lopsided braid.
The other was her sister.
Mira.
She had darker eyes, sharper than memory had preserved. A grin that didn't quite fit the innocence of her age. In the video, she whispered something in Elara's ear, and both girls burst out laughing. The laughter echoed — and then distorted, slowed, reversed. A lullaby replaced it.
The room began whispering, but not in voices.
It whispered with memories.
The walls leaked them.
The floor shivered. A low, groaning creak came from behind one of the grand bookshelf facades. Stone scraped against stone, grinding like teeth, and a panel slid slowly open at the far end of the room.
Behind it, a corridor was revealed — narrow, torch-lit, curving like a spine into the mansion's underbelly. The air there was cold, wet, and breathing.
And from within it: humming.
A girl's lullaby. Off-key. Sweet. Broken.
No one had to be told to follow. The rules were no longer theirs. This wasn't about solving puzzles, or winning the game.
This was personal.
They descended in silence. The corridor tightened around them, the walls pressing inward as if they were being inhaled. Along the stone, fingerprints stained the surface — oily, frantic. There were scratches. Names etched with broken nails.
Mira.
Ella.
And then — Elara.
She stopped in her tracks, breath catching in her throat. The letters were ragged, uneven, like they had been carved during a seizure. Her name didn't belong here. Not like this. And yet it was there.
Behind her, Jace's voice broke the silence, a whisper so fragile it felt sacrilegious.
"How long do you think she's been down here?"
Harper answered without hesitation, her voice low. "Too long."
At the bottom of the corridor, they found it: a chamber, circular, ancient-feeling. The ceiling was made entirely of mirrors — shattered ones. Cracks spiderwebbed across the glass above them, fragments refracting light into dozens of directions, like the Room couldn't decide what was real anymore.
The floor was layered with the debris of a stolen childhood — melted crayons, burned notebooks, broken dolls, singed blankets. Scattered photos. Most had faces scratched out.
And in the center — a chair.
Not just any chair. A mirror-throne. Ornate, angular, its entire surface made of mirror fragments, reflecting each of them a hundred times in broken distortion. It looked like a seat carved from memory itself. Something ancient. Sacred.
It was empty.
But a girl's laughter echoed from inside the mirrors.
"Hello, Ella," said the voice.
Elara spun. It was behind her. Then beside her. Then directly in her ear.
"I waited."
It was Mira. Or what remained of her.
The mirrors flashed again — faster now. Scenes that hurt to watch. Mira alone in the dark. Drawing on stone with a crayon stub. Singing lullabies to shadows. Scratching Elara's name over and over into the walls until her fingers bled.
"You promised," the voice said, colder this time. "You said you'd never leave."
The mirror-throne flickered — for a breath, it wasn't empty. A girl sat there, knees pulled to chest, face hidden in tangled hair. Her dress was tattered, her limbs too thin, too pale. Her eyes flicked open — glassy and glowing.
Then she was gone again.
"I had to leave," Elara said. Her voice cracked. "The fire—"
"No," Mira snapped. "You chose to forget. You let them take you. You became them."
Kemi flinched beside her, a hand twitching toward her tablet. "She's not talking about us."
"Not yet," Jace murmured.
Elara took a tentative step toward the throne. Her breath fogged the glass near it. "This place. The mansion. The tests. The deaths. Mira… was it all you?"
A pause.
Then, soft: "No. I built the Room. They turned it into a trap."
"Who?"
"The ones who taught us how to lie."
The mirrors on the ceiling shimmered again. This time, the faces weren't of children. Adults in lab coats. Masks. Observing through glass. Writing in notebooks. A woman with a long braid and icy eyes appeared — the name Coyle seared itself into Elara's mind.
"No," Mira whispered. "Before her. The Mother of Mirrors. She fed on secrets. On us. We were her children. Her stories. You were supposed to stay with me, Ella. We were supposed to break it together. But you ran."
Elara's knees gave. She dropped, trembling. "I didn't remember. I didn't know. They took it from me."
"But you gave it away first," Mira said. Gentle. Hollow.
Silence.
Then the words again.
"Only one leaves."
Harper turned sharply. "She said it."
"No," Kemi whispered. "She wrote it."
The phrase. Carved into stone. Etched into metal. Repeated endlessly in the mirror fragments like a curse.
Mira had written it. As warning.
Or a rule.
Or maybe… revenge.
"I want to fix this," Elara said. "Please. Help me."
The mirror-throne pulsed once.
Then the walls peeled.
The Room came apart — not in pieces, but in layers. Behind the cracked glass, another space emerged — darker, deeper, twisted like a maze built inside memory itself.
And in that space — a second throne.
This one was not empty.
A figure sat there. Unmoving. Tall. Dressed in something that looked like ceremonial robes — stitched from veil-like fabric and shadow. A mask covered its face — not porcelain, not metal.
Mirror.
Smooth, round, and reflective. It had no mouth. No eyes. But somehow… it watched.
"Who's that?" Harper asked, her voice breaking.
The voice that answered wasn't spoken aloud.
It bloomed inside each of their heads.
That's the one who stayed.
The one who waited.
The one who became the Room itself.
The masked figure rose.
In its hand, it held a mirror.
Black. Polished. Utterly smooth. Not reflective. Not at first.
But then—
Each of them saw something different within it.
Kemi saw herself in a pristine facility. A server room. Screens. Cables. She was younger, hungry with ambition. Watching numbers spiral. Systems awaken. But behind her — a door opened she couldn't close. Children. Screaming. Code she'd buried.
Harper saw a school. The alarm blaring. Smoke. A locked door. Children on the other side, crying for help. Her lips sealed shut. Her hand refusing to act.
Jace saw himself in a bathroom. A needle. A friend convulsing. A wallet in his grip. A choice made.
Dorian saw a child. Maybe his brother. Maybe not. Begging at a door. His hand holding it shut. Fear in his eyes. Silence in his soul.
Elara saw Mira.
But not the child in the videos.
This version of her was older. Eyes sunken. Hair matted. Half-machine. Half-memory. Like a ghost that forgot it had once been alive. Rage and loneliness stitched into her flesh. Surrounded by mirrors she couldn't escape.
The masked figure raised the black mirror toward them.
And the Room answered.
Light blazed across the chamber. Mirrors ignited with memory. Screams erupted from the walls — old and young, male and female. Laughter. Cries. The sounds of secrets being torn open.
Words carved themselves into the floor:
Trial Initiated: Mirror of the Forsaken.
The masked figure took a step forward.
Then another.
And the throne behind it melted into darkness.
Elara grabbed the locket at her throat, feeling it heat again — faster now, frantic. Like it knew.
This wasn't just a test.
It was judgment.
And the mirror didn't lie.
Only one leaves.