They say darkness is the absence of light.
They're wrong.
Darkness is the presence of everything you were never meant to see.
I stepped out of the room barefoot. The hallway greeted me with a breath colder than death, lined with walls so pale they seemed to pulse—like flesh trying to forget it once had life. There were no windows. No lights. Just a slow-flickering bulb at the far end, as if hope had been hanged and left swinging.
My footsteps didn't echo.
Sound here was devoured, not carried.
The corridor stretched infinitely forward, but the moment I looked back—
The door I came from was gone.
No handle. No frame. Just wall.
Panic?
No.
I'd buried that long ago.
All I felt was a question crawling up my spine:
"What did they erase from me?"
Each classroom I passed had a number, scratched instead of printed. The digits weren't in order. Room 12 came after Room 3, and Room 7 was nailed shut with rusted bolts that bled. From inside, I heard soft weeping—or maybe laughing.
I didn't stop.
Every few minutes, the bell rang again.
The Third Bell.
I felt my grip on language twist. Simple words like "student" or "teacher" began to sound… wrong.
Foreign. Violent.
Like traps.
On the wall to my left, written in a scrawl that looked clawed into the plaster, were the words:
You are not learning. You are being rewritten.
I walked for what felt like hours, yet the corridor never ended. The world outside had vanished—if it ever existed. Only this corridor. Only this cold. Only this sound:
A dragging noise.
Behind me.
Slow. Deliberate.
I refused to look.
Because deep down, I knew the truth:
Whatever was behind me… wore my face.
When I finally saw another student, he wasn't moving.
Standing in front of Room 13, face pressed to the door, whispering to it.
"Do you know who you are?" I asked.
He turned.
His eyes were gone.
His mouth was sewn shut—with thread made of hair.
He pointed to my chest.
I looked down.
There was a name tag pinned to my shirt.
But it didn't say Ayaan.
It said: SUBJECT: 0001-A
Under it: "To observe is to corrupt."
The door of Room 13 creaked open—without anyone touching it.
I stepped inside.
The door didn't open.
It invited.
There was no knob. Just that same wet hum—like the sound of a brain pulsing underwater.
I stepped inside.
It smelled of chalk, dust, and something unclean. The room was lit by a single bulb swinging wildly from the ceiling, casting sharp shadows that danced like predators. Desks were nailed to the floor in a perfect circle. There were no chairs. Only places to kneel.
In the center was a mirror.
Cracked. Wide. Facing inward, so anyone kneeling would be forced to look at it.
A small speaker on the ceiling crackled, and a voice—not human, not robotic, but like it had been stitched from many voices at once—spoke:
"Welcome, Subject 0001-A.
Please remove your identity."
The mirror flickered. And for a moment—I saw my real face.
Not the one I wore in photos.
Not the one I saw in glass.
The real one.
Tired. Paranoid. Starving for meaning.
And then I understood Room 13.
This wasn't a classroom.
It was a confessional.
But not for sins.
For lies.
The walls were covered in notes, taped and torn and bleeding ink:
"I like my parents."
"I'm mentally strong."
"I've moved on."
"I deserve to live."
Each sentence… crossed out.
Underneath, one word repeated:
"False."
"False."
"False."
The bulb above me flickered, then burst. Darkness swallowed the room.
And then—the projector started.
A video played on the far wall.
My childhood.
Except… not the real one.
It was edited.
Cut with scenes that never happened.
Or maybe… did.
A teacher who whispered things to me in class when no one was looking.
A friend who "moved schools" but left behind bloodied notebooks.
A voice in my head that said, "Keep smiling, or they'll notice you're broken."
I dropped to my knees.
I didn't want to.
But the room had decided that's how truths are told here.
The voice returned:
"What is your first lie, Subject Ayaan?"
I whispered.
"I don't need help."
"Correction: You were born needing help."
And just like that—
The mirror shattered on its own.
And my reflection smiled without me.
I stumbled out of Room 13 an hour later.
The hallway was gone.
There was only a staircase now, leading down.
The fourth bell rang.
And something deep inside me…
forgot what up felt like.
I took the first step downward.
The staircase was narrow, carved out of something between stone and bone. The walls bled softly, like they were weeping. Each step pulsed with warmth, as if it remembered every foot that had touched it before—and what those feet had tried to escape.
I counted my breaths, not to stay calm, but to remember I was alive.
Because the air here felt… unreal. Like I was breathing someone else's dream. Or nightmare.
The Fourth Bell rang again.
But this time, it didn't sound distant.
It sounded like it was ringing inside my chest.
I looked down. My name tag had changed.
It now read:
SUBJECT: 0001-A
"Emotional Stability: Withering"
Halfway down the stairs, I found her.
A girl. No older than me. Dressed in the same stitched-gray uniform.
Sitting on the steps, arms wrapped around her knees, eyes wide and red. But not from crying—from watching. She had been staring into the shadows below for so long that I wondered if the dark had stared back.
"You're new," she said, without turning to me.
Her voice was too calm. The kind of calm that only comes from people who've stopped hoping.
"Yeah," I replied. "Class 10."
She laughed. Dry. Broken.
"They don't care what class you're in here. That's just a number. Like your subject tag. Like your survival rate."
I didn't ask her name.
Here, names felt fake.
She stood up, slowly.
Her hand brushed against mine, and I flinched.
It was ice. No—worse. It was numb. The touch of someone who had forgotten how warmth feels.
"Don't go past the Seventh Bell," she whispered.
"Why?"
She leaned close. I saw her face clearly now.
One of her eyes was real. The other was a mirror shard, embedded where her pupil should be.
"Because after the seventh," she said,
"they stop trying to teach you. And start trying to break you."
Then she vanished into the dark below—swallowed by the same staircase I was now condemned to walk.
I descended further.
The deeper I went, the more the staircase stopped feeling physical.
My feet touched the steps, but my thoughts didn't follow.
Like each stair was erasing something—
A memory.
A feeling.
A person I used to be.
By the time the Fifth Bell rang, I couldn't remember my sister's face.
By the time the Sixth echoed, I couldn't remember why I ever wanted to survive.
At the bottom of the stairs, there was no door.
Just a mirror. Full-length. Clean. Waiting.
And written across it, in letters made of ash:
"To proceed, identify your first weakness."
I stared at my reflection.
My face was cracked.
Like the truth was leaking out of it.
And then I said, not to the mirror, but to myself:
"I want to be seen. But I'm terrified someone might actually look."
The mirror didn't shatter this time.
It opened.
Beyond it: a new hallway.
Taller. Narrower. And lined with doors that breathed.
One of them had my heartbeat coming from behind it.
End of Chapter One.