There's a hush inside old buildings that doesn't belong to silence. It's older than silence, older than breath. The air holds itself still—an invisible shroud, waiting, watching. It's a pause that makes your own heartbeat thunder in your ears, loud and unfamiliar.
The antechamber wasn't on any blueprint. She didn't find it so much as it found her—slipping through the cracks of architecture and time like a secret waiting to be spoken.
Rasmika crossed the threshold, and the heavy door slammed shut behind her. No sound followed. No wind stirred the dust. Just a sudden, suffocating silence that pressed against her skin.
The room was small. Its walls were lined with cracked frescoes, fading gods with hollow eyes that seemed to track her as she moved. Forgotten faces, ancient and unreadable. But the centerpiece was the mirror—taller than any mortal should face, its frame carved with serpents curling endlessly into themselves, mouths agape, scales shimmering with impossible iridescence. The glass, warped and untarnished, was a pool of cold shadow.
She stepped forward, brushing aside a curtain of cobwebs. The air smelled of cold stone, burnt roses, and something metallic—like forgotten blood.
At first, she didn't see herself in the glass.
Just a shape. Her shape. But... off.
Her hand rose, automatic—fingers twitching with a habit deeper than thought. The reflection lagged. One second. Two. Then it copied her movement like a child too tired to pretend.
Her breath hitched. Her heart paused, then thundered.
She blinked. The reflection blinked after. Not a glitch. Not a delay. A choice.
The glass pulsed, like breath pressing against breath.
Then—"Alira."
A name spoken not aloud, but inside her spine, like memory surfacing through mud, dark and slow.
Her eyes widened. The voice was unfamiliar, yet intimate. Like her own, but centuries removed.
Her fingers twitched. Her breath shallowed. The name sat on her tongue like a secret that burned.
"Alira." Whispered again. Closer now. From inside her. Or behind the mirror.
She could no longer tell where she ended and the voice began.
A slow, suffocating dread pressed in, but she stepped forward. The floor creaked beneath her, a sound like bones protesting.
The reflection smiled. But it wasn't a smile. Not really.
The girl in the glass—older, different. Haunted. Someone who had seen too many die. Or done too much herself.
Smoke coiled behind the mirrored figure. Flames flickered in the depths of the glass. A hand reached out, trembling with a scream in a language she didn't know but understood in her blood.
Her throat tightened. She stumbled back. Her spine hit the cold stone wall.
The mirror exhaled.
Mist spread across the glass, soft as breath on winter.
And for a moment—she was somewhere else.
A sandstorm whipped through a palace corridor. Mirrors shattered like glass stars raining down. A barefoot woman ran, clutching a blade stained with old blood. She was—Alira.
A shudder slid down Rasmika's spine. She blinked hard.
The mirror was still again. The flames gone. Her reflection returned—shaken, pale, too still.
She didn't touch the glass. Couldn't.
Her fingers trembled, knees begged her to flee.
But pride held her still.
She backed out slowly, never turning her back to the mirror.
Once outside, she shut the door behind her.
But not before hearing it again—faint, deliberate:
"You're remembering, Alira."
Her name—or a name not hers?
She didn't know what haunted her more: the voice calling her by a forgotten self, or the sick, sweet certainty that it had always been hers.
The heavy door before her had ancient locks, crusted with the dust of forgotten centuries. They should have been invincible.
But when her fingers traced the rusted iron, something inside flickered—a restless fire no archaeologist could explain.
The patterns shifted beneath her touch, a language long buried surfacing in the bones of her fingers. Her breath hitched; her pulse synced with the strange rhythm echoing in the walls.
Click.
One by one, the padlocks surrendered.
The door groaned open, revealing the same narrow antechamber, bathed now in a deeper twilight.
And the mirror stood waiting—unmoved, unchanged.
Her reflection blinked again, but not in sync.
Her mirrored eyes were black as obsidian. They flickered, then looked away.
The lips parted, whispering just for her: "Alira…"
The name rolled out like a spell, thick with ancient weight.
The room stirred.
From the dark corners, slender snakes emerged. Their skins glistened wet, tongues flickering in ritual greeting.
They slid toward her — not to strike, but to coil gently around her ankles and wrists.
Cold as winter, but reverent.
They recognized the pulse in her veins.
Leaves from dried garlands rustled as if an unseen wind breathed life into them, swirling around her in a slow, purposeful dance.
The air tasted of rain and burnt sandalwood.
Rasmika's logical mind screamed retreat.
But her body stayed—suspended between fear and fascination.
The mirror's surface shimmered again, revealing not her face, but a void—a darkness that swallowed her reflection whole.
The whispers crescendoed—names and memories bleeding through time, a chorus haunting the edges of her sanity.
This was no ordinary mirror.
It was a gateway.
And it called her by the name she had tried so hard to forget.
The moment hangs like smoke, thick and impossible to shake.
Rasmika stands caught between worlds—her own fractured self, the shadowed past, and a future heavy with forgotten truths.
In the silence of that antechamber, time fractures, memory bleeds, and the dead gods watch with hollow eyes.
She is both the seeker and the sought.
Alira.
The name that binds her across centuries, across lives, across mirrors.
And now, it is awake.