Chapter Twenty-Five: Faces Beneath the Glass
Rain had been falling nonstop for three days.
The hospital windows were drowned in fog, and the white light had lost its sharpness.
The same clock was still hanging on the wall, frozen at 3:07, even though the nurses swore they had changed the battery.
Noor was sitting in a small room with five other patients.
A group therapy session.
In the center stood a table with a glass of water for each of them, and a small notebook open to a blank page.
The new doctor, a man in his late thirties named Dr. Samer, looked at everyone with a reassuring smile.
"Good morning… today I want you to write down what haunts you in your dreams."
Everyone picked up their pens.
Noor remained silent, staring at the glass in front of her.
The reflection in the water began to change slowly.
It was no longer her face —
but the faces of the others around the table.
Each of them looked down, yet their reflections were staring directly at her.
She closed her eyes.
She tried to ignore it, but a whispering voice rose inside her head:
"They're not sitting here… you're the only real one."
She opened her eyes quickly.
All the patients were now staring at her, their faces expressionless.
One of them spoke in a strange, broken voice:
"Noor… why did you come back here?"
She froze.
Dr. Samer hadn't moved, as if time had stopped around him.
"What do you mean?"
"You left the mirror open."
At that moment, the lights went out.
Darkness flooded the room, then a gray glow appeared in the corner, as if rising from beneath the floor.
Niyar emerged from the shadows.
The same gray eyes, but this time his features were filled with sadness.
"Look at them carefully, Noor," he said calmly.
"These aren't patients… they're parts of you."
"What?!"
"Each one carries a memory you buried — fear, guilt, regret, and anger."
He stepped closer, pointing to them one by one:
"That man there is your silence when you didn't defend yourself."
"That short-haired girl is your fear of loneliness."
"And over there, in the corner, the anger you hid toward your mother."
Noor began to cry.
"I'm not all of this… I can't be!"
"You are the whole of it, Noor."
Niyar took another step forward.
The world around them began to crack like glass.
The walls, the table, the chairs — all shattered into tiny fragments floating in the air.
"It's time to choose."
"Choose what?"
"To return to the real world and leave all these parts behind… or to stay here, in the mirror, where there is no pain and no guilt."
A heavy silence followed.
Then Noor looked at her reflection in the broken glass on the floor.
She saw herself in dozens of versions — some smiling, some screaming, some fading away.
She said in a trembling voice:
"And if I return… will I forget?"
"Forgetting is the price of freedom."
He stepped closer and extended his hand.
But this time, there was no darkness or mystery in his eyes.
There was a soft, warm light — like dawn after a storm.
She hesitated for a moment, then slowly reached out her hand.
When their fingertips touched, everything vanished.
She woke up to daylight for the first time in a long while.
She was in a quiet white room, her hands unrestrained, no voices in her head.
Dr. Layla stood beside her, smiling gently.
"How do you feel, Noor?"
"Light… as if I had been underwater and just surfaced."
"Do you remember what happened?"
Noor was silent for a moment, then smiled softly.
"I was searching for myself… and I found her in a place I didn't expect."
She looked toward the window.
Her reflection there finally matched her perfectly — it didn't blink, didn't smile on its own.
It simply looked back at her as she was.
But deep within the glass, she noticed something faint…
a gray shadow slowly drifting away, then disappearing.
"Goodbye, Niyar."