The moment Elara's fingers touched the carved wood, darkness swallowed her.
Cold air rushed past her face, carrying whispers and faint screams. Her vision blurred. The floor beneath her disappeared. For a heartbeat, she felt weightless… then she landed on something soft, uneven, like moss, but colder than ice.
She scrambled to her feet. The corridor behind her had vanished. In its place was a vast room walls made entirely of mirrors, cracked and fogged. Faint shadows moved within them. Each reflection didn't match her. Some smiled. Some screamed. Some had eyes like hollow pits.
Elara's breath caught. "Where… am I?" she whispered.
A voice answered soft, haunting, familiar: "Inside… where you've been all along."
She spun around. A figure stepped from the shadows. It was her or a version of her sitting in a wooden chair, pale and trembling. But its eyes were empty, almost hollow.
"Why… why am I here?" Elara asked, her voice shaking.
The other Elara tilted her head. "Because the door remembers you. Every time you left the mansion, a piece of you stayed behind. This room… keeps the parts you forgot."
Elara's stomach twisted. Pieces of memories fragments she didn't recognize flashed in her mind. A birthday she never had. A corridor she had never walked. Faces she didn't know, crying, laughing, pleading.
The mirrors shifted suddenly, forming corridors inside themselves. Elara could see herself walking through those mirrors, stepping into rooms filled with trapped versions people who had disappeared years ago, pale and broken, repeating the same actions over and over.
A faint whisper echoed: "Join us… stay…"
Elara shook her head violently. "No! I won't!"
But the room shifted again. Mirrors moved closer, bending reality. The trapped versions in the reflections reached out, hands pressing against the glass as if they could pull her inside.
Suddenly, she felt something brush against her arm. She looked down a pale hand, smaller than hers, pressed through the floor. It grasped her ankle, pulling her downward. Panic surged.
"Elara… you have to remember," the pale figure whispered. "Or the door will… take everything."
The whispers became louder, voices overlapping her voice, the trapped people's voices, strangers' voices all calling her name.
She stumbled backward, hitting a cracked mirror. Her reflection fractured. And in that fractured reflection, she saw something impossible: herself… screaming, but in the past. She was inside the mansion… from years ago… staring at the hidden door.
The floor trembled violently. The hands from the mirrors and floor reached toward her. The trapped versions whispered one final warning:
"You can never leave… not fully…"
And then, darkness swallowed her again.