They didn't walk.
They fell.
Through the broken mirror, through the roots, through memory.
Down.
There was no scream. No wind. Only the sound of pages turning.
When they landed, the world around them shimmered with a dreamlike distortion. Time here didn't tick. It breathed.
Amelia blinked. Her shadow was gone.
Alexis looked up. The sky above was paper-thin, covered in spiral markings, bleeding black rain.
Before them: a door.
A wooden one, carved with hundreds of names. Some they recognized. Most they didn't.
The lock opened on its own.
Inside, a cradle rocked gently, though no one touched it. On the walls: moving photographs—of girls who resembled them, but with missing eyes, missing mouths, or inverted faces.
Amelia stepped closer to one photo.
It blinked.
Alexis opened a drawer. Inside: a note written in her own handwriting, though she had never written it.
> "Do not remember too fast. You'll burn."
From the cradle, something sighed.
And then, the walls began to pulse again—just like the room above. The roots were deeper here. Hungrier.
And something was growing beneath the cradle.