Julian awoke to an endless hallway of mirrors.
The floor reflected the sky.
The ceiling rippled with his own gaze.
The walls, the doors—every surface fractured and gleamed,
each pane reflecting him in impossible ways:
taller, older, broken, laughing, weeping,
versions of himself he did not remember being.
He stood slowly, bare feet pressing against the cold, perfect glass beneath him. Each step echoed—but not just in sound. The reflections around him responded.
They moved.
Some a fraction too slow, others too fast. One turned to stare directly at him while the rest mimicked his steps. Another smiled—wide and hollow, teeth too long, as if proud to be free from his control.
The corridor seemed endless, but not still. With every step forward, the space warped. The mirrors rippled, convulsed, and settled into new shapes. Sometimes they showed nothing. Sometimes they showed someone else.
A child version of him crying in a corner.
An older self holding a broken watch.
A version of him with no face at all.
Whispers bled through the silence—thin and sharp like glass cutting through fabric.
"You left."
"You forgot."
"You broke it."
"You were supposed to remember."
Julian pressed forward, heart pounding. He didn't know what he was walking toward.
Only that if he turned around now, the hallway might swallow him forever.
Each mirror whispered.
Not in unison, but in a chaotic chorus—voices splintered and overlapping, echoing versions of thoughts he didn't know he had.
Each mirror distorted differently:
One stretched his body into a gnarled, shadowy silhouette.
Another hollowed his eyes.
One wore his skin like a costume—smiling, too wide, too still.
And all of them walked with him.
Step for step, they matched his pace.
But none of them moved quite right.
Then, after what felt like forever—he saw it.
A door.
Or rather… a mirror shaped like a door.
It stood at the end of the hall, impossibly tall and perfectly still.
Unlike the others, it didn't ripple.
Didn't whisper.
Didn't follow.
Julian approached, breath shallow.
"A… mirror door?" he murmured, but even his voice sounded warped—muffled, like it had traveled through water before reaching his own ears.
The door pulsed faintly, as though waiting to be touched.
And within it—
No reflection at all.
He peered into the mirror—harder this time, as though sheer focus could summon an image.
But there was nothing.
No trace of himself.
No warped hallway behind him.
No shadows moving in the glass.
Just the door.
A perfect, still pane of silver.
And that absence—that silence—echoed louder than any whisper.
Julian stood there, breath fogging a surface that refused to recognize him.
No reflection.
Not even a blur.
He swallowed hard.
Walking through this hallway, step by mirrored step, had felt like being watched.
Each reflection had followed him.
Mimicked him.
Mocked him.
But now… staring into a surface that refused to respond, a deeper fear settled in his chest.
What if they hadn't been following him at all?
What if he had been following them?
He reached out, fingers hovering an inch from the cold, seamless glass.
And for the first time, he asked himself—
Was he still real?
Or had he become just another echo…
Just another reflection?
He pressed his hand to the silver glass, bracing for resistance—something solid, cold, unmoving.
But the moment his palm met the surface, the mirror shivered beneath his skin.
And then—
Crack.
A thin fissure splintered outward from his touch like a spider's web, delicate and immediate.
Julian staggered back.
But it was too late.
The crack moved, rippling like sound through water—spreading not just across the door, but bleeding outward in jagged veins along the walls… across the mirrored floor… up the mirrored ceiling.
The entire hallway groaned.
Then came the sound.
Like a breath being sucked inward—sharp, massive, endless.
The mirrored corridor—his mirrored world—began to fracture.
Reflections twitched.
Surfaces buckled.
And every version of him began to smile.
But none of them were smiling the same way.
Some laughed.
Some screamed.
One pounded on the glass from within.
Another simply turned its back.
The splinters widened. Light—if it could even be called that—bled through the cracks, like moonlight seeping through broken bone.
And then…
The hallway shattered.
The hallway shattered like brittle ice.
Julian didn't fall down—he fell through.
Through the mirrored floor, through the reflections that had haunted him, through a world that folded inside out. There was no direction, only descent. No ground, only echoes.
Then—impact.
He hit cold tile with a grunt, the breath knocked out of him.
Silence.
The air was thick and stale, like a room that hadn't been opened in decades. Dust floated through the dim, blood-tinged light, though there was no source—only a faint, reddish glow that seemed to ooze from the walls.
Julian rose to his feet, disoriented. A hallway stretched ahead—long, cracked, almost familiar.
He took a step forward.
That's when he saw it.
Above the peeling frame of a rusted doorway at the far end, half-obscured by vines and mold, the metal letters read:
RED WING – CONDEMNED
Julian's breath hitched.
This was no wing of Blackthorn University he remembered.
It was the reflection of it.
Something broken.
Something watching.
The light overhead hummed—low, constant, mechanical.
And the shadows along the walls…
they didn't sit still.
They watched.