Peach couldn't sleep. The soft glow of her phone filled the room with a sickly light, the latest messages blinking insistently: "Why did you ignore me?"
She tried to look away, tried to convince herself it was a prank. But when her eyes wandered to her arms… she froze.
Jagged, dark marks traced across her skin, like someone had carved a secret message into her body. She hadn't felt it happen. She hadn't been awake. Yet there it was proof of something watching her.
A chill ran down her spine. Her room seemed… wrong. Shadows lingered in corners where there shouldn't be any. The ceiling fan cast patterns that writhed like living things.
Her phone buzzed again. Another message: "You're mine now."
Peach screamed but it was swallowed by the walls. She stumbled to the mirror, hoping the reflection would offer reassurance.
It didn't.
Her reflection smiled. A twisted, cruel smile. Its arms were covered in marks, identical to hers but darker, sharper, as if the shadows themselves had etched them. Peach raised her hand. The reflection moved first.
A whisper filled the room, faint and guttural: "You're late."
Peach's heart raced. She didn't recognize her reflection anymore. The person staring back was… waiting. Waiting to step out of the glass and claim her.
And then the twist hit: the shadows weren't in the room, they were inside her. Every shiver, every pulse of fear, every racing thought was being mirrored, twisted, rewritten. Peach wasn't the only one awake. Something else had been moving ahead of her all along anticipating her, shaping her, rewriting what she thought was reality.
The last thing she heard before the shadows swallowed the room was her own voice but it wasn't hers saying: "You should have listened."