By the time I opened my eyes, sunlight had already been stretched thin across the windows — except it wasn't sunlight. It was something duller. Paler. As if the house was trying to mimic daylight but forgot how.
I shuffled toward the bathroom, heavy with sleep and dread, half-hoping Mirror Alya had just been a bad dream.
I looked into the mirror above the sink.
Nothing looked back.
No face.
No eyes.
Not even a smudge of my presence.
Only an empty, fogged surface.
---
At breakfast, nobody greeted me.
The staff walked past like I didn't exist. Not coldly. Not cruelly. Just... like I'd never been real in the first place.
And then she came down the stairs.
Mirror Alya.
Hair brushed to perfection, in a sky-blue dress I'd never owned. Her feet never stumbled. Her voice — bright, loud, full of certainty.
The staff bowed. To her.
Aaryan stood up from his seat at the head of the table.
I waited for him to glance at me.
He didn't.
Instead, he smiled at her.
"Good morning, Alya."
My throat closed.
"That's not—" I started, stepping forward.
He turned to me like I was a bug interrupting dinner.
"Please don't speak during family breakfast," he said flatly.
My hands trembled.
"But I'm—"
"You're the ghost in the corner," Mirror Alya said kindly. Her voice was pitying. Sincere. It made me want to scream.
"I'm the real one!" I snapped. "I'm Alya!"
But my voice came out wrong.
Not like me. Not even human. More like static trying to form a sentence.
Mirror Alya smiled, then looked at Aaryan.
"Can we send her away? She's scaring the house."
---
I ran.
Out of the dining room. Through the halls. Up staircases that shouldn't exist. Into rooms that weren't there yesterday.
The mirrors didn't show me anymore.
In one of them, I saw her — brushing her teeth. Wearing my pajamas. Sleeping in my bed.
Even the house didn't remember me.
Only one thing did.
The painting in the forbidden corridor.
A long stretch of canvas that showed generations of Nightfall brides — women in silk and shadow, their eyes always hidden, their smiles stitched small.
I'd looked at that painting before and never seen anything familiar.
But now?
Now the last woman in the row — the final bride — had my face.
My face.
But it didn't look like me.
It looked like Mirror Alya.
And in the corner of the painting, faded into the brushwork, was a tiny face in the shadows.
Mine.
The forgotten one.
The trial run.
---
I collapsed on the floor.
Fingers clenching the cold marble.
Tears wouldn't come. The house didn't let you cry past a certain point. It just turned your emotions into fog, then silence.
Then nothing.
But I wasn't going to be nothing.
Not again.
I crawled to the only mirror that still shimmered — the one in the basement.
The one they never touched.
The one with the crack down the center.
I stared into it. No reflection.
Just black.
But I spoke anyway.
"Tell me how to beat her."
Silence.
Then a whisper.
"Take something she doesn't know she needs."
---
That night, I slipped into her room.
My room.
She was asleep in my bed, curled like a princess.
On the bedside table was my journal.
Open.
She had written in it.
> Dear future me,
If you're reading this, I'm sorry. I think I'm starting to like it here.
Beneath it, another sentence.
In red ink.
> Soon, even you won't remember what your voice sounds like.
I reached for the journal — but before I could touch it, her hand closed around my wrist.
Eyes still closed.
But she spoke.
"You're fading, Alya. You're becoming exactly what the house wants."
Then she opened her eyes.
They weren't mine anymore.
They were the house's.
---