The words on the diary bled across the page, thick and wet like fresh wounds.
"Every opening takes a price."
Aarav stared, his chest still heaving. His fingers twitched, desperate to slam the diary shut, to throw it out the window, to do anything but keep looking at it. Yet, his hands betrayed him—they reached forward, trembling, brushing the edge of the page.
The letters shimmered. And then… they began to rearrange.
Aarav blinked. The words twisted into a sentence he couldn't mistake:
"The price is you."
A jolt of ice ripped down his spine. His breath hitched, throat tightening. Suddenly, the shadows in his room shifted, moving though there was no wind. They crawled up the walls, stretching long fingers across the ceiling until they converged above his head.
From the corner of the room, his mirror rippled like disturbed water. Slowly, a reflection formed—not his own, but hers.
The girl.
Her face pale, her lips trembling. This time her eyes were wide with urgency, not sorrow. She mouthed a single word.
"Run."
Before Aarav could react, his reflection in the mirror changed. His own face stared back at him, but the eyes—those weren't his. They were glowing red, slit-pupiled, serpent-like. The other Aarav smiled, lips curling into something predatory.
The mirror cracked.
Aarav staggered back, his heel knocking against the edge of his bed. Shards of glass rained onto the floor, but the reflection didn't vanish. It stepped forward.
Shards shouldn't allow passage. But this thing pushed through them as though the broken mirror was nothing but water. The other Aarav—dark, twisted, smiling—emerged into the room.
For the first time, Aarav screamed.
The sound tore from his throat, raw and desperate. His doppelgänger tilted its head, almost amused, before whispering in a voice that sounded like his own but layered with something ancient and monstrous:
"The door has been opened. You are no longer just you."
The lights in his room flickered violently, then burst. Darkness swallowed everything, leaving only two faint glows: the diary's crimson words and the red eyes of the figure standing before him.
Aarav stumbled backward, hitting the wall. His hands searched blindly for anything—a lamp, a book, a weapon. But the shadows pinned him, cold tendrils curling around his wrists.
The diary snapped shut with a loud thud.
And in that suffocating dark, Aarav realized something horrifying.
The figure wasn't moving closer.
It didn't need to.
Because it was already inside him.