Remember
514 Words
A sudden sound cut through the room.
A whisper.
Not his voice.
Not mine.
Something else.
All around us.
My head snapped toward the shelves.
The lights flickered once.
Twice.
Then—
The room went cold.
Too cold.
Lucien’s expression changed instantly.
“Don’t move,” he said sharply.
My heart pounded. “What is it?”
His eyes locked onto something behind me.
And for the first time…
Fear finally showed.
“Close your eyes,” he said.
I didn’t.
I couldn’t.
Because I felt it.
A presence.
Not behind me.
Not in the room.
Everywhere.
And then—
It spoke.
Not out loud.
Inside my mind.
“Lucien Vale.”
The world tilted.
Lucien moved instantly—grabbing my wrist.
The mark burned like fire.
I gasped—
And the study disappeared.
Darkness swallowed everything.
Then—
A voice, softer now.
Closer.
Not threatening.
Almost… familiar.
“There you are.”
And somewhere in that darkness…
I realized something terrifying.
Lucien wasn’t the beginning of this story.
He was the one trying to keep me alive long enough to understand it.Darkness didn’t feel like absence.
It felt like presence.
Something was there with me—close enough that I could almost feel breath against my skin, even though I couldn’t see a thing.
My hand was still in his.
Lucien’s grip was tight. Unmoving. Anchoring me like I was the only thing keeping him from being pulled away too.
“Don’t listen,” he said, voice low.
My throat was dry. “To what?”
No answer.
Instead—
The darkness whispered again.
But this time, it wasn’t just in my mind.
It was inside everything.
The air. The silence. The space between my thoughts.
“You were never meant to be hidden.”
My chest tightened painfully.
Lucien’s hand tightened around mine.
And suddenly, I understood something I didn’t want to understand.
He wasn’t just holding me.
He was holding me back from something else.
Something was trying to reach me.
A sharp pull ripped through my body.
I gasped as the ground—or what felt like ground—shifted beneath me.
Lucien cursed under his breath.
Then everything changed.
I was standing again.
But not in darkness.
Not in the study.
I was somewhere else.
A place that felt like a memory that didn’t belong to me.
A long corridor stretched endlessly ahead, lined with broken mirrors. Each one reflected something slightly wrong—faces that weren’t mine, eyes that blinked when I didn’t move.
Lucien stood beside me.
But he looked different here.
Less like a man.
More like something trying very hard to stay one.
“Where are we?” I whispered.
He didn’t answer immediately.
His gaze was fixed ahead.
“…Between,” he said finally.
“Between what?”
His jaw tightened.
“Between what it remembers… and what it refuses to forget.”
That didn’t make sense.
And yet, somehow, it did.
The mirrors trembled.
Then one of them cracked on its own.
A sound like laughter slipped through the corridor.
Soft.
Wrong.
Familiar.
- Writer
