The cracks began small. Hairline fractures across glass, subtle bends in reflections, distortions that twisted the world into something just slightly wrong. At first, they appeared only at night. Later, they lingered through the day, spiderwebbing across windows and mirrors like frozen lightning.
The figure moved differently now. It no longer copied motions with delay. Instead, it acted on its own. Sometimes it raised a hand when no one moved. Sometimes its head tilted when there was no reason. At times, it turned its back entirely, staring deeper into the reflection as though something behind the glass was calling it away.
Then, without warning, the barrier weakened. Reflections began to shudder like disturbed water, sending ripples across smooth surfaces. Furniture warped in the glass, walls stretched and buckled, and the shadow pushed harder from within.
The first breach was brief. A long, thin hand slipped through, fingers blacker than the absence of light, dripping with an oily sheen. They pressed against the air, leaving behind smears that lingered on walls long after the hand retracted. Hours later, those smears pulsed faintly, like veins beneath skin.
By the second breach, it stepped further. A head emerged, stretched and featureless, with hollow sockets where eyes should have been. No mouth, no nose, no voice. Yet the silence it carried drowned every sound around it—the hum of machines, the tick of clocks, even the rhythm of breath.
The moment it leaned half its body through the glass, the world shifted. Shadows lengthened unnaturally, corners deepened into endless pits, and every surface reflected only the figure itself—hundreds of it, staring outward in perfect unison.
The fractures spread wider. Shards of reality hung suspended in the air like broken glass. Every mirror, every window, every drop of water became an open wound between two worlds. And through those wounds, The Hollow Stalker began to crawl.
When the lights failed, silence consumed everything. The last thing seen in the faint glow of fractured reflections was a silhouette stepping fully across the threshold, leaving the glass behind.
The world no longer needed mirrors to contain it.
It was here.