The corridor air feels older than me. Thin where it should be full, full where it should be thin, as though it remembers how many lungs it has already filled and resents filling mine. My throat burns; my chest aches for something clean, but every breath scratches like a warning.
Candles run the length of the walls in perfect ranks. Each flame stands straight and tall, as if someone taught them how to behave. Their light does not warm.It pins it down. It pins me down.
Pedestals rise like gravestones. Each one crowned with a glass case, square and sharp, each holding something inside.
The first cases are hers: a pressed fern turned the colour of old tea; a torn corner of a letter in that small, exact hand; the frayed end of her scarf, smoothed and re-smoothed until the threads learned obedience.
The next case holds a child's ribbon. My school ribbon. Navy, starched stiff and pinned flat. Then a vial with a tooth, root bruised with dried blood. A lock of hair curled too neatly. A child's drawing of a girl with my hair and smile, except the smile is too wide, and the eyes show all the white.
I pause at the ribbon. The glass fogs under my breath. Pale letters rise from the mist as though they were waiting beneath:
She prepared herself to live without you.
My stomach twists.
The air shifts and his voice seeps in the way water creeps under a door—quiet, inevitable.
"Do you remember the day she sent you away?" His tone is measured, exact, each word weighed before it touches me. "She was rehearsing. Teaching herself to live without you. Training her heart to let go, little by little, so the final parting wouldn't ruin her."
The words from the glass, leaving only my own blurred reflection.
His chuckle is quiet but it bites. "Clever, wasn't she? Cruelty dressed as wisdom. Selfishness wearing silk."
I move on. The next pedestal holds a strip of cloth scorched to gray. When I breathe on the glass, new words gather.
Her fear became your burden.
The compass stirs faintly in my palm, weak as a failing pulse.
"Mmmm…" he hums, soft, certain. "She faltered. She fled. She turned her back. So you must turn forward. That is what inheritance means, darling. Not love. Not a blessing. Only failure, passed down neatly like heirlooms."
I hold the compass tighter until the rim bites, though it gives me almost nothing back.
The corridor narrows. The pedestals crowd closer, their corners brushing my sleeves as I pass. Each case reflects back a broken part of me: a mouth in one, an eye in another, my shoulders repeated again and again at slightly wrong angles. In one reflection my palm is empty. In another it holds an ash-grey flame that gives no light.
"Mine practised, too," he says. Something in his voice shifts—less sharpened mockery, more a line drawn with a sure hand. "Not with schools and ribbons but with stone and locks. With a distance so absolute even sound refused me. She said it was for safety…" he pauses, long and heavy "…but fear always puts its own comfort first."
Another pedestal. Inside: a ribbon gone stiff by something dark. When I breathe, letters twist into being:
You are her debt.
"Yes," he says, quiet, almost thoughtful. "You are not chosen. You are not cherished. You are the task she would not finish… In that, we are already bound."
The final pedestal holds a charred scrap of parchment. Its edges curl into brittle lace. Only half a line survives, blackened but legible: …another way… When I breathe across the glass no words appear. Only a faint scratched mark, shallow and quick, in the lower corner:
◊
The sight stops me. The compass warms against my palm—not a tug, not a command, just a stubborn pulse, alive and unwilling to release. He says nothing of the marking.
Instead his voice slides closer, velvet drawn over teeth. "And yet even now you cling to that little trinket. You stroke it like it might care for you." A low chuckle, dry and hollow. "It doesn't. It's only a lead, darling. A leash she tied to your wrist so her failures could drag you here in her place."
The pedestals fall away and the corridor comes to an end.
A mirror rises: black glass, wide as the wall and tall as the corridor. It devours the light until the candles stand like pale bones.
I see myself reflected: not simply hollow-eyed but pared down by exhaustion, edges sharpened by a hunger I can't name. My hand grips the compass with white-knuckle devotion as if I could wring answers from its silence. I look like a sentence already passed.
Then the image shifts.
My mother assembles in the glass as if memory were given form—the scarf glowing faint at her throat, fringe knotted by restless fingers, her left hand crooked from the old wound. Beauty precise, brittle like porcelain too thin for its own weight. Her gaze carries no warmth, only the sharp vigilance of someone always waiting for a blow. She looks at me the way she used to look at locked doors—not with love, but calculation.
Then him.
He gathers out of darkness the way a secret gathers on the tongue—slow, deliberate, certain of itself. Not a blur. A man. Beautiful the way storms are beautiful when far enough away to watch. Beautiful the way a blade gleams when it has been honed past kindness. His face is exact, as though designed rather than born. Cheekbones like cut stone. A mouth curving with the suggestion of a smile that never arrives. Eyes that smolder low, patient, unhurried—the kind of fire that waits through winters and consumes only when it chooses.
The suit he wears is black that devours texture, cut so sharply the seams look etched. Lapels closed like a sealed book, cloth without a wrinkle, as if even thread and fiber fear to disobey him. He does not claim the space. He simply reminds me it was his all along.
His image wavers and fades.
From the darkness something steps forward. It's me, but wrong. Eyes like dark pools, set too wide, glistening as though already full of tears. A mouth trembles into a parody of a smile, teeth clenched as if waiting for a blow. Her frame fragile, yet her gaze steady in its accusation. She looks at me as though she already knows what the end will be.
The mirror groans. A thin crack feathers outward from her pupils. Another follows. White veins spread until the whole surface trembles under the strain of holding itself together. A shard falls—silent—and vanishes before it can touch the ground. Another. And another.
The glass gives way piece by piece until the mirror is nothing but a few shards and a frame holding absence.
And yet she remains.
My reflection still stands where the glass should be, mimicking every moment. When I lift my hand, she follows. When I breathe, her chest rises and falls in time with mine.
I tilt my head left. She tilts left. I tilt right. She stays straight.
Her mouth twitches—hers, not mine. A smile spreads across her face, slow as a crack across ice.
The space where the mirror was ripples, distorting her image. My features smear and drag, pulling long as if something beneath claws to the surface. My eyes widen too far. My cheeks hollow. The smile sharpens into something cruel, patient, certain.
The distortion does not fade. It settles.
She straightens inside the frame of absence, wearing me like a mask pulled too tight. My face stripped of softness. My eyes emptied of hesitation, fixed and unblinking. My mouth bent into a grin too patient, too cruel, as if it has been waiting all along for me to collapse.
Every weakness pressed out. Every tremor erased. What remains is my skin, my body, my face—steadier, sharper, filled with inevitability.
The last of the glass slips from the frame and disappears before it touches the floor. Then she moves. One foot, then the other. Not reflected. Not contained. She steps into the corridor with me, the hollow frame yawning dark behind her.
There is nothing between us now.
She stands in my place, wearing my face without fear. She breathes the same air.
The compass flutters once in my palm—a small, stubborn tremor, fragile against the weight of her presence
His voice drifts through the silence, rich and deliberate, each word a knife sheathed in silk. "Look at her," he murmurs, velvet pressed close. "The self you should have been. Certain. Unshaken. Not some stumbling little vessel that woman left behind." A pause, intimate enough to make my skin crawl. "Do you envy her?"