The Heart of the Hollow
Darkness. Not the kind that comes with night, but a complete absence—a suffocating void where even fear couldn't echo.
Nori gasped as breath returned like a blade to the chest. She sat up—fast—her fingers digging into damp moss. She was alone.
No Max.
No fire.
No voices.
Only the forest, dim and pale, bathed in an eerie twilight that didn't belong to any real sky. The trees loomed taller than before, impossibly thin, their bark slick like wet stone. Above her, there was no sun. Just a dull white glow, diffuse and sourceless, like the world itself was holding its breath.
She staggered to her feet, her pulse hammering in her ears.
"Max?" she called, voice too small.
Nothing.
Then came the crunch of leaves.
She spun—but it wasn't Max. It wasn't even Eli.
It was her.
Mary stood at the tree line, just far enough away that her features blurred—but Nori knew it was her. The soaked nightgown. The wet, clinging hair. Those hollow eyes, deeper than death, wider than guilt.
"I'm sorry," Nori whispered, but even she didn't know what for.
Mary tilted her head—not unlike how Eli had, earlier—and slowly raised her arm, pointing deeper into the forest.
Then she was gone.
No footsteps. No vanishing act. Just… gone.
Nori swallowed hard and turned in the direction Mary had pointed.
---
The path was strange. Not a trail, but a memory. The trees shifted with each step, branches rearranging themselves behind her. Sometimes she thought she glimpsed pieces of the old house—a hallway door, a shattered chandelier, the wallpaper Jess had once screamed over. But it was all fragmented. Echoes, not places.
And then she heard it:
Max.
Screaming.
She ran.
The trees opened onto a clearing, circular and unnatural—too perfect. In its center stood the mirror. Whole again.
Max was on his knees before it, clutching his head, the locket now in his hand. He was sobbing. Violently.
Nori dropped to his side. "Max! What happened? Where's Eli?"
"He's in it," Max croaked. "They pulled him in. I tried to stop it. I tried—"
The mirror pulsed.
Max dropped the locket as if it burned. It hissed as it hit the grass.
Nori looked up—and saw the surface of the mirror shift. Not a reflection. Not anymore.
A scene played like film behind glass: the original fire. The house on the hill. The group of them as children, standing in the attic, holding hands in a circle, chanting the words they'd been warned never to say.
She saw herself.
And Mary.
So small. So trusting.
So easy to sacrifice.
"No," Nori breathed. "That's not how it happened."
But the mirror didn't lie.
It never had.
Max reached for her, tears streaking his cheeks. "We didn't save her, Nori. We offered her. We fed the house. And now it's starving again."
"I didn't know," she whispered.
"Yes, you did," came a voice behind them.
Eli.
Or what was left of him.
His skin was ash-pale, his eyes now fully black. The forest behind him bent to his presence. The mirror throbbed like a beating heart.
"She showed me the truth," he said softly. "Mary never left. She was trapped here, because of us. And now…"
He held out his hand.
"…we trade places."