The crypt split behind me, a great rift opening in the marble as if the world itself rejected my presence. I didn't run—I walked—feet bare, breath steady, the cracked doll clutched in my arms like a totem of memory.
The hall beyond wasn't made of stone. It looked like it was carved from shadow and mist, the walls shifting with faint outlines of things that didn't like being seen. My fingers grazed the edge of the nearest one and the surface warbled, like I'd touched water too deep to guess the bottom.
The shard embedded in the doll's eye pulsed faintly. Not light, exactly—something more ancient. A rhythm, like a heartbeat long buried.
It was guiding me.
The path led upward, through a spiraling stairway of onyx where each step echoed more in memory than in sound. I saw pieces of myself again—tiny fragments, playing in the mirror-like steps as if watching an old theatre reel: me, learning to dance; me, sneaking sweets from the royal table; me, crying alone as strange women whispered about what I would become.
It wasn't nostalgia.
It was theft.
Something had taken all of this from me, and now it was showing it back like a performance—Look what you lost.
The air changed.
Gone was the scent of crypt dust and moss. Now it smelled of incense and blood.
I reached the threshold of a crumbling monastery. Columns stood like bones in the fog, broken arches yawning like mouths without teeth. Glass littered the floor—not smooth, royal glass like in the castle I once knew, but black and scorched, like it had been pulled from the eyes of dead stars.
And then I saw them.
Figures in silver masks. Dozens of them.
Some sat in circles, cross-legged in silence. Others walked slowly, dragging their feet like forgotten wind-up toys. Their masks were delicate but wrong—each shaped like a different emotion: laughter, rage, sorrow, apathy. But none of them fit. They were forced on. Glued to faces that had forgotten how to frown or smile on their own.
One looked up as I passed.
A young woman in a porcelain joy mask—cracked at the mouth. She didn't speak, but her hands reached out, trembling. She touched the shard-eye in my doll... and whispered a single word:
"She remembers."
A chill ran down my spine.
"Who are you?" I asked.
No answer.
But another voice came, calm and male, from behind a curtain of misted veil.
"She is one of the Masked—like us. Lost children. Cursed remnants. Those who walked too close to their dreams and came back with ghosts in their skin."
A figure stepped forward.
No mask.
His face was marked with scars in the shape of mirror veins, running from his left eye down to his collarbone. His eyes were twin pools of obsidian, but in them danced clarity, not madness.
"My name is Cyran," he said. "We have been waiting for you."
"Waiting… for me?"
He nodded. "The Dream-Eater doesn't let anyone go unless something breaks the pattern. You were that break. You are not the first to be cursed. But you are the first to remember enough to fight back."
My grip tightened around the doll.
"Why did it choose me?"
He studied me carefully. "Because your bloodline is tied to the Glass."
A pause. A shiver.
"The same kind of magic that birthed the girl with the glass slipper. That cursed a dance to become death. That turned a girl in red into a story mothers use to hush their children."
I felt my stomach drop.
"Are you saying… all of us are part of the same curse?"
"Not a single curse," he said. "A war. Between the stories that rule this world—and those who seek to rewrite them."
He pointed to the doll in my hands.
"That shard in her eye is part of the Mirror Crown. Pieces were scattered through different tales—buried in sleeping minds, bound in songs, trapped in trials. You have one now. But the Dream-Eater will come for it."
I swallowed.
"Why tell me all this?"
"Because we're not all lost," he whispered. "Some of us want to end the cycle. We just didn't have a spark."
He reached into his cloak and pulled out a scroll sealed with dark wax. The insignia wasn't royal.
It was a broken clock wrapped in thorned vines.
"The others will come," he warned. "You're not the only one waking up."
"Others?"
He nodded. "A girl who danced until her bones shattered. A boy who saw his reflection smile before he did. And one who carries the curse of a mother who lied about love."
A deep hum echoed beneath the floor.
Time was breaking again.
Cyran pressed the scroll into my hands.
"When the mask speaks to you," he said, stepping back, "don't run."
The monastery shattered into dust.
And I was falling again.
But this time… I was falling toward something.