There was no escape from them.
Even in silence, I heard their voices.
Even in shadow, I saw their faces.
By the third week of May, the cellar had become a mausoleum—not for the dead, but for my thoughts.
Hunger gnawed at me from within. My limbs ached from stillness. My throat, always aflame, pulsed with the memory of phantom blood.
I tried not to surface, I tried not to see.
But the mind turns on itself when it's cornered.
I don't remember deciding to leave the cellar. One moment I was sitting in the dark, nails digging half-moons into the stone, and the next—my body moved. Climbing, barefoot, into daylight. Drifting like smoke into the remains of the old house. My house, what was left of it.
I wandered through what once was a sitting room, now overtaken by dust and ivy. Floorboards warped. Wallpaper peeled like dead skin. The piano had collapsed in on itself—an empty carcass. The air stank of rot and mildew, but none of it offended me. No—what disturbed me was how familiar it all felt.
I didn't belong to this ruin. And yet it belonged to me.
On the second floor, I passed by the guest room.
Someone stood inside.
My chest locked.
Victorine
Perched on the edge of the bed, swinging her legs like a child. Her eyes sparkled with mischief, I blinked. She didn't vanish.
"You always said denial was the first defense mechanism to fall," she chirped, tilting her head.
I stepped into the room, cautiously.
"You're not here," I muttered.
She grinned. "Neither are you."
I turned away, my head throbbed. Hallucination, stress, and starvation. I'd studied this. Lived this, I knew what the mind could conjure when it broke itself against reality.
Down the hall,
Serge
leaned against the doorframe of the study, arms crossed.
"You look like hell," he said. "Told you therapy wasn't for everyone."
"Leave me alone," I growled.
He chuckled. "Oh, but you brought us here."
I walked faster.
Downstairs, back toward the cracked entryway. A mirror once hung there—ornate, oval, framed in dark wood. I remembered it vaguely. I'd walked past it for years without ever really seeing myself.
But now, something pulled me to it.
The frame still clung to the wall, though the glass had splintered down the center. I approached, hand trembling. I hadn't looked at my reflection since that night—the crash, the fire, the... awakening.
I didn't want to.
But I had to.
I stood before it.
At first, nothing. Just warped glass, fogged and fractured. My silhouette blurred.
And then the light shifted.
And I saw it.
Not me, not entirely. Too still and too pale. Eyes too bright. Hair too dark. And the face—it was mine, but stretched, smoothed, alien. No pores, no warmth, and no breath. Marble, not skin. Glass, not soul.
I staggered back.
The reflection didn't.
It smiled.
My knees hit the floorboards. I gasped—or tried to. There was no breath. Only the burn in my throat. My ribs rattled with panic, but my body refused to behave as it once had. I clawed at my face, my neck, trying to feel something human.
"Who are you?" I whispered.
Behind me, the air shifted.
"You know who."
I turned.
Élodie stood by the mirror, her dress soaked through as it had been the day she died. Her skin was pallid. Her eyes, hollow.
"Remember what you did. To all of us."
I shook my head, but the tears wouldn't come. My body no longer knew how to grieve.
"This isn't real," I whispered.
She stepped closer. "Then why do you feel it?"
The mirror cracked—splintering, shrieking—and with it, my image fractured. A dozen versions of myself stared back, each worse than the last: smiling, weeping, snarling, burning.
And in each shard, I saw someone else's face behind mine.
A patient, a soul I couldn't save. Their grief etched into my skin like a curse.
I fell back, crawling away.
"I'm not—this isn't who I am," I said.
Victorine's voice drifted down from upstairs. "But it's what you've become."
Serge laughed from the shadows. "You never were the savior you thought."
And Élodie knelt beside me. "You only ever told us how to pretend to be better. You never knew what to do when we broke."
Her voice was soft. Almost kind.
And it was that softness that destroyed me.
Because she was right.
I crawled back into the cellar, slamming the trapdoor behind me. Darkness swallowed me like water.
Down there, I could almost forget the mirror.
But the reflection followed.
Even with my eyes shut, I saw it burned into the backs of my lids.
The monster who wore my face.