**Phase I — First Quarter**

The camera in the west corridor glitched again.

Lena scrubbed backwards on the feed, glancing at the timestamp: **03:37 a.m.** A figure walked past—just a brief silhouette in the grainy static, but wrong somehow. It had the height of a human, the pace of a human.

But no face, just blur.

She checked the crew log. Everyone had been accounted for at the time. Sleeping. Dreaming of sunlit places far from here.

”Too much caffeine,” she muttered, shutting off the monitor and returning to her corridors.

Outpost Erebus squatted in the Arctic like a rusting lung. Eight researchers, no sunrise for weeks, and a creeping sense of too much silence. Everyone said the same thing: _don’t let the dark get to your head._

**Phase II — Full Moon**

They lost Dr. Ivanov on the night the moon bloomed bright and full over the ridge.

He’d gone out to repair the southern antenna array—ten minutes, tops. But the storm came hard, a whiteout that swallowed everything. When the wind settled, they searched for hours.

They found his parka snagged on a pole.

His boots were still in the equipment room.

Lena found Dr. Hassan in the med bay, staring unblinkingly into a mirror.

”I remember me,” he muttered. “I remember me.”

The reflection didn’t move. Not right away.

**Phase III — Third Quarter**

Only four of the original eight scientists remained. And none of them remembered arriving at Erebus almost a month ago.

Dr. Saito insisted it was _day three, _not day thirty since arriving at the outpost. She showed Lena her journal—half-empty, dates scrawled but repeating, always looping back to November 13th.

They stopped eating together, trust became fragile, and Lena started sleeping with a wrench under her pillow.

One night, she crept into the archives. In a sealed box, she found old mission logs—decades old—with crew names etched eerily familiar into the paper: Hassan. Saito. Even her own.

All missions ended in silence.

She descended to Sublevel 3, the part of the station marked “Unstable—Do Not Enter.” There, she found a circular chamber lined with mirrors, all cracked or fogged, except one.

In that one, she stood alone in the tundra. Behind her, the outpost was gone.

**Phase IV — New Moon**

Darkness. No stars. No moon. Just cold and static and an aching sense of dread.

Lena woke to silence. Saito was gone. Hassan sat in the lounge, whispering to the wall.

”You’re not her,” he said to no one. “You just wear her voice.”

Lena opened the door to the outside, cold wind rushing to meet her. The snow formed a perfect blanket. Untouched. Like no one had ever walked here at all.

Inside, the power flickered. Systems rebooted. The date reset to November 13th.

She returned to the mirror room, her steps echoing in the unbidden silence.

This time, the unbroken mirror showed her a journal. She looked down.

She was holding it now.

One last note was written inside, in her handwriting:

— “_You made it this far last time. Try again.”_