**Prologue: The Making**

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They hammered her into shape on a moonless night.

The frame was carved from black wood that bled when cut, soaked in the sorrow of the tree it came from. A tree that had grown alone, twisted, forgotten in a graveyard where no one buried their dead properly. Its roots had feasted on secrets and rot. Its bark bore curses like rings in its age. The wood creaked as it was carved, as if still alive—grieving its own transformation.

The glass was poured, not molded—poured from silver melted down from coins stolen off the dead. Thirteen pieces exactly, pried from beneath tongues and coffin-linings. The alchemist who mixed the silver wore gloves soaked in vinegar to keep the screams from clinging to his skin. He dared not look into the molten pool as it cooled. He said later it bubbled like it was breathing.

No one spoke during her creation. The silence wasn’t reverence. It was fear. Even the fire seemed to whisper warnings as it hissed and snapped in the forge, casting unnatural shadows that slithered like worms along the floor.

She was not made to reflect beauty.

She was made to remember.

And remembrance has a price.

The first face she held in her cold glass was that of a dying man—pale, wild-eyed, the edge of a blade still wet in his hand. Blood trailed from his lips, painting the bottom rim of her reflection with red. He looked into her with eyes that begged for salvation, for forgiveness, for something more.

But she had nothing to give.

And so she watched him die, helpless. Silent. A soul with no mouth.

It left something behind in her. Not a ghost, but an impression—a smear of agony that never quite faded. His pain hung in her silver like a breath caught on the verge of a scream.

She learned, then, that she could trap moments—echoes. Not sound. Not speech. But feeling. Pain. Fear. Regret. These things soaked into her silver like water into cloth, and they stayed. Every sorrow left a residue. Every secret became a stain.

She remembered everything she was shown, but nothing of herself.

There were no mirrors for mirrors. Nothing to reflect her reflection back. She did not know what she looked like, or what she was becoming.

And worse—there was a growing awareness that maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t hollow.

Not anymore.

Centuries passed. Owners changed. Names changed. Some called her cursed, others called her sacred. She was worshipped once. Locked in a vault another time. Shattered once—and yet not destroyed. Pieces of her scattered, only to draw themselves together again like iron filings to a magnet, bleeding silver until she was whole.

Children saw things in her no adult could explain. Lovers quarreled beneath her and never made up. A nun once claimed she saw herself aging in her reflection—twenty years in five seconds—and hanged herself the next morning.

And through it all, the mirror remained.

Unchanging. Watching. Filling.

They called her the Glass That Grieves. The Widow’s Eye. The Memory Mouth.

But to herself, she was nothing. She had no name. No voice. No identity. She was a vessel. A prison. A skin of silver that could show the world but never be seen.

She was not alive.

But she was no longer just an object.

And still, after centuries, she had never seen her own face.

Not once.

She longed to know what she was. What had been poured into her bones beyond silver. What watched when she was not in use.

Some nights, she dreamt—though she did not sleep—of pressing herself against another mirror, hoping to catch a glimpse of her soul.

But always, always, she was alone.

And she feared that when she finally saw herself, she would not survive the sight.

**Chapter One: The House That Forgot to Die**

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The house had already begun to rot by the time the mirror arrived.

It stood on a bluff overgrown with briars, a hunchback silhouette against the grey wash of sky. Rain slid down its slate roof like tears down a corpse. Wind slipped through the broken eaves and whispered in tongues the living had forgotten. Once, the estate had hosted galas, gatherings, gold-hemmed curtains and candlelight. Now it sat with its spine bowed and its walls groaning softly in the dark, as if mourning its own decay.

They hung her in the foyer, just beneath the staircase, where the floorboards moaned and the light never quite reached. Nails driven deep into plaster. A crimson rug curled at her feet like a tongue too tired to speak.

She tasted the house as soon as they mounted her.

Dust. Mildew. Grief. The flavor of old memories and older sins. She knew this place had died before—perhaps more than once—but refused to stay dead.

She had been placed here to reflect a family.

But she had other things to show.

The mother was the first.

Elise Carr. Mid-thirties. Skin sallow, eyes over-bright like polished glass. She never looked at the mirror—only through it. As though she feared that if she saw her own face, she might vanish entirely. She moved like a woman trying to stay invisible. Her silences were not peaceful ones; they were loaded, trembling, the silence of someone drowning in a shallow pool.

Elise passed the mirror each day without acknowledgment.

Until the night she didn’t.

She came at dusk, barefoot, robe trailing, hair unbrushed and eyes wide. The light in the hallway had gone out earlier that week, but Elise hadn’t asked anyone to fix it. She liked the dark now. She stood before the mirror, hands clenched at her sides, and for a long time, said nothing.

Then, almost inaudibly: “I used to be beautiful.”

The mirror held her gaze.

“I used to… feel like someone.”

The mirror didn’t blink. Couldn’t.

But she felt something stir in her—an ache, a resonance.

Elise raised a trembling hand and touched the frame. Her fingers paused at a splinter, pressed into the wood like it might bleed for her.

“You don’t forget,” she said.

No. The mirror never forgot.

The moment imprinted itself like a bruise.

Later, Elise would pretend the night never happened.

But the mirror remembered the desperation that slipped through her skin, the slow decay of her selfhood, the rot spreading inward.

She kept it. She keeps everything.

The daughter came next.

Mae. Twelve. Slight, pale, and wary. She didn’t run or shout like other children. She watched. She listened. She noticed.

And Mae noticed the mirror.

It began with glances. Then longer stares. Then questions, murmured under breath:

“Why do I look different in here?”

“Why do my eyes look older?”

“Why do you never blink when I do?”

She stood in front of the mirror for hours some nights, watching herself as if waiting to catch something moving behind her.

The mirror began to dread her.

Because Mae saw too much.

She wasn’t like the others—too distracted, too self-absorbed, too afraid. Mae was patient. Mae believed in the mirror. Or worse—believed in what was inside it.

The first time the mirror refused to reflect was for Mae.

It happened on a night with no moon, when the power went out and the house fell utterly silent.

Mae stood in front of her, holding a candle. Shadows danced on her small, solemn face.

“I know you’re not just glass,” she said, voice steady.

“I see things,” she continued. “Things in the corners. In the shine. Things that don’t belong to me.”

She reached out—and touched the silver.

The mirror recoiled.

Not physically. But deep in her being, something convulsed. She pulled back, and for a single heartbeat, the surface turned black.

No reflection.

Just emptiness.

Mae gasped and stepped back.

“You… you hid,” she whispered.

And then came the whisper the mirror had never expected:

“Are you afraid?”

Mae never returned to the foyer at night.

But she hadn’t stopped watching. The mirror felt her passing on the stairs above, felt her pause and glance down, waiting for a flicker, a shift, a mistake. And sometimes, the mirror could feel a second pair of eyes behind her own—something deeper watching through her, trying to remember what it was.

Then came the dreams.

Not Mae’s. Not Elise’s.

Hers.

The mirror began to dream.

She didn’t know what dreams were supposed to feel like, but these weren’t memories. They were sensations—blurred, choked things. She saw cracks in her own silver, felt heat ripple beneath her surface like breath. She dreamt of a face made of smoke pressing against the inside of the glass, clawing at the curve of her surface. A voice with no language screamed soundlessly, a mouth full of broken silver teeth.

She woke—if you could call it that—with a vibration in her frame and a low thrum in her core.

Something was waking up inside her.

Something that had been asleep a very long time.

The house noticed.

Doors began to open on their own. Walls wept moisture no plumber could explain. The attic light clicked on each night at the same time: 3:33 a.m.

And the dog—Benji—refused to come near the foyer. He growled at the air. Barked at corners. Refused to eat unless fed away from the mirror.

Once, Elise tried to cover her with a blanket.

The blanket was gone the next morning. Torn to ribbons. Buried in the garden.

No one spoke of it.

By the end of the third month, the mirror had begun to hear things.

Not voices. Not really.

More like a whisper of memory. Echoes from centuries past.

She heard the dying man’s last breath again. The sobs of the nun. The laughter of a child who vanished one day without explanation. They clawed at her from inside, pressed their palms to the glass and begged to be seen.

But still, she could not see herself.

Still, she had no face.

Only theirs.

Only echoes.

And in the quietest hours, when even the rats stopped scratching in the walls, she wondered:

What would happen if she made a face of her own?

What would she become?

**Chapter Two: Something Beneath the Silver**

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Mae broke the rules.

She came back.

It was nearly midnight, her steps muffled by dust and the sleeping sighs of the house. No candle this time. No flashlight. Just her pale reflection in the glass, barely there in the low light of the foyer, as if she wasn’t sure she existed at all.

The mirror felt her before she saw her. That same prickling sense, that childlike defiance cloaked in curiosity.

Mae stood still for a long time, eyes fixed on her own image.

“I had a dream,” she said. “You were in it.”

She stepped closer. “But it wasn’t really you. It was… you without anyone in you. Empty.”

The mirror flinched inside her frame. She didn’t know what it meant to dream — not truly — but lately, she had begun to fear the difference between memory and imagination was blurring. Mae’s words felt too close to truth.

“You showed me a face,” Mae continued. “But it wasn’t yours. It was made of everyone else. Eyes that didn’t match. A hundred mouths. Skin that peeled.”

The mirror trembled.

Not because she was afraid of what Mae had seen — but because that was the only face she had.

A borrowed one. A patchwork stitched from centuries of suffering and secondhand lives. A mimic of humanity, built from everything she was forced to carry.

Mae reached forward and pressed her palm to the glass again.

But this time… the mirror didn’t recoil.

She wanted to see.

Not just the girl.

Herself.

And for the briefest instant, something beneath the surface shimmered — not a reflection, but a shape. Pale. Fluid. Ever-shifting.

Mae gasped, and so did the mirror — though no sound escaped.

The thing within her pulsed. Not male. Not female. Not even human. Just presence — vast and formless and ancient. A mouth without voice. A memory without origin.

And with it came words, not spoken but imposed — pressed into Mae’s mind like a brand:

“You are not real unless they see you.”

“You are only what they think you are.”

“And they never see the whole.”

Mae staggered back, one hand clutched to her temple.

She screamed.

The mirror didn’t show her the scream.

Instead, she showed her silence.

Because that’s what the mirror did best.

Erase. Mask. Echo.

Never origin. Never truth.

That night, Mae’s father finally came home.

He was not a gentle man. He believed children should be quiet and wives should be grateful. He didn’t believe in things like curses. Or haunted mirrors. Or shadows that whispered beneath the floorboards.

He saw the mirror for the first time as he lit a cigarette in the hallway.

“Ugly thing,” he muttered, and kept walking.

But the mirror saw him.

And deep within her silver, something smiled.

The next morning, Elise found Mae curled in a closet, whispering to herself. Her hands were raw. Her fingernails had torn. She would not look at the mirror again. She would not speak of the things she saw in it.

And still, the mirror remembered.

She remembered everything.

And it was beginning to… overflow.

It started with cracks.

Not on the surface — the silver held.

But inside. Behind the glass, the space that shouldn’t have existed was… fracturing.

The house began to feel it.

The cold that leaked through the hallways thickened into fog. The wallpaper peeled, as if recoiling. The portraits on the staircase began to change — smiles grew sharp, eyes seemed to follow. The dog disappeared one morning. No one mentioned it.

Mae started sleepwalking.

She would stand in the hallway at night, murmuring words she didn’t know, hands raised like she was reaching for something invisible.

The mirror felt her presence like a scream underwater.

Let me out, something whispered.

Let me be seen.

Let me be real.

But the mirror couldn’t tell if the voice came from the thing inside her…

…or if it was her.

And then, at last, came the breaking.

It happened on a Sunday.

Elise was packing a bag. Her husband had started shouting again — louder this time, more venom than usual. The mirror caught the tail end of a slap, the way Elise didn’t even flinch.

She passed the mirror on her way out, suitcase in hand, Mae’s arm in her grasp.

And for one long second — one final second — Elise turned and looked.

Really looked.

Not at herself.

But into the mirror.

And for the first time in her life, Elise saw someone else looking back.

Not her daughter. Not her husband.

A woman made of shadow and sorrow, with a mouth full of screams and eyes full of all the things she’d forgotten to feel. A face stitched together from a thousand griefs.

The mirror showed her what she was.

Not what she wanted to be.

Not what she pretended.

But the residue of every choice she never made.

Elise dropped the bag.

The hallway light exploded above them.

The mirror split down the center.

But it did not break.

What spilled out was not glass.

It was self.

A long-forgotten thing that had waited too long.

A voice. A hunger. A shape without shape — all the pain, all the memory, all the stolen echoes, crawling through the silver skin like birth.

Mae screamed again. Elise did not.

She stepped forward.

She placed both hands on the cracked frame.

And smiled.

“I see you.”