At first, there was only silence.
Not the comforting kind, but the kind that listens back.
Then came the sound of breathing—her own—ragged, uneven, echoing like wind through hollow glass.
Rhea's eyes fluttered open.
She was standing.
Or maybe floating.
It was hard to tell—the ground beneath her wasn't solid. It shimmered, bending light like the surface of water.
Her reflection moved below her feet, but it wasn't alone. Dozens of other faces floated alongside it, emerging and fading beneath the glassy floor—faces of strangers she'd never seen, some whispering soundlessly, some staring with wide, unblinking eyes.
She took one step forward. The sound of her footstep stretched endlessly, echoing like the start of a memory being replayed.
She was inside the mirror.
The world around her was vast—an endless cathedral made entirely of glass and light. Pillars of silver rose into a ceiling she couldn't see. Each mirrored wall reflected not just her image, but fragments of other lives—scenes replaying endlessly like trapped films:
a mother combing her daughter's hair by candlelight,
a man writing a letter he never finished,
a child standing before a dark doorway, crying for someone who never came.
Everywhere she looked, reflections moved without her.
Each one was slightly delayed, slightly wrong, as though every mirror remembered a version of her that no longer existed.
"Where… am I?" Her voice came out small, swallowed instantly by the vastness.
At once, the air thickened.
The whispers began.
They came softly at first—like wind brushing past glass. But they grew louder, overlapping into a thousand voices murmuring at once. They weren't words she could understand—just fragments, broken pieces of lives once spoken aloud.
> "He didn't come back…"
"Don't forget me…"
"It's so cold here…"
"I remember… I remember…"
Rhea pressed her palms over her ears. The whispers didn't stop. They vibrated through her skin, her blood, her mind.
"Stop!" she shouted. "Please—stop!"
And they did.
All at once.
The silence was worse.
Then, one voice rose from it. Clear. Soft. Familiar.
> "You came back."
Her breath caught. "Clara?"
A faint light flickered down one of the endless corridors. The mirrors there shimmered like water disturbed by wind. Rhea turned toward it and began walking, each step feeling heavier than the last.
The corridor seemed to bend and stretch as she walked. The mirrors beside her rippled, showing glimpses of Clara's face—sometimes alive, sometimes pale and ghostlike, sometimes nothing but empty glass.
"Clara, where are you?" Rhea whispered.
No answer. Only the light, pulsing ahead of her, guiding her like a heartbeat.
She followed until the corridor opened into a vast chamber—round, domed, and hollow. Here, the mirrors curved inward, forming a perfect circle. In the center floated a shape, black and fluid, its edges dissolving into smoke.
Rhea stopped at the edge. The light from the mirrors trembled as though afraid.
The figure turned.
It had no fixed form—sometimes tall, sometimes thin, sometimes splitting into several shapes before merging back again. Its surface shimmered like liquid glass, and inside it flickered reflections—faces, countless faces, all shifting in and out of focus.
Rhea's heartbeat thundered in her chest. "What are you?"
The air vibrated with a sound that wasn't quite a voice, yet she understood it inside her mind.
> "A question asked by every one who crosses the threshold. I am what remains when stories die."
She swallowed hard. "The Collector."
The figure tilted its head—though it had no true head at all.
> "A name. Nothing more. You give names to what you fear to understand."
Rhea stepped closer. "You keep them here. The souls. The voices. You trap them."
> "I preserve them," it said calmly. Its voice echoed like the hum of deep metal. "The world forgets. I remember. Each silence leaves an echo, and I gather them before they fade."
The mirrors trembled. The reflections of the trapped souls appeared all around her, watching. A child pressed his small hands to the glass nearest her. A woman mouthed Rhea's name through the barrier, eyes wide and pleading.
Rhea's voice shook. "You're not saving them. You're feeding on them."
The Collector's shape rippled.
> "I feed on what you abandon. Every erased name, every memory buried in silence, becomes a part of me. I am built from your forgetting."
Rhea's stomach twisted. "Then you're a curse born from us."
> "No," it murmured. "I am the price of ignorance."
The chamber darkened. The light from the mirrors dimmed to blue, shadows spreading like ink.
Rhea could feel her heartbeat inside her skull. She stepped back, but her reflection didn't move this time. It stood still—watching her with unfamiliar eyes.
"I came here to end this," she said, trying to steady her breath. "To free them."
The Collector drifted closer, and with each word, its reflection multiplied, filling every mirror with its shifting form.
> "To free them, you must remember them. All of them. Every forgotten voice, every story never told. But memory is pain, and pain feeds me too. Can you carry it without breaking?"
Rhea's throat tightened. "If I don't, who will?"
For a moment, the Collector didn't move. Then it extended something like a hand—thin, glasslike fingers dripping with reflection. The surface of its arm shimmered, showing flashes of lives within it: a crying infant, a wedding, a scream, a fire.
> "Then take what you awaken," it said. "And know—every name remembered will leave its mark."
Behind her, the mirrors began to rattle. Cracks spread like lightning across the walls. The trapped souls pressed their hands against the glass, whispering her name again and again—
> "Rhea… Rhea… Rhea…"
Her heart pounded in her throat. Somewhere faint and distant, she heard Aarav's voice.
> "Rhea! Wake up! Please!"
She turned sharply toward the sound. "Aarav?"
The Collector's tone deepened.
> "He cannot follow where you've gone. He stands at the edge of silence."
The glass beneath her feet started to tremble. Shards of reflection drifted upward, floating like weightless dust.
The Collector's final words reached her as the mirrors began to shatter one by one.
> "You have opened the way. But once opened… silence must be fed."
A scream tore through the hall—Rhea's, or the souls', she couldn't tell.
Then everything broke.
The mirrors exploded into a storm of light and shadow, swallowing her whole.
And in the fading glow, a single whisper lingered—
soft, distant, endless:
> "Remember us."
---
To be continued…