chapter 4
1538 Words
CHAPTER 4 : SHATTERED REFLECTIONS
I couldn’t move.
Every muscle in my body had turned to stone, locked in the grip of disbelief. My breath came in shallow, uneven gasps. My chest burned with something deeper than fear—something old, something that had festered too long in the dark.
I stared at him.
Damian.
The man I had mourned.
The man I had screamed for in nights I couldn't remember and dreams I couldn’t forget.
The man the world had erased.
And yet there he stood, as real as the dull ache blooming in my temples. The air in the room thickened around us, charged with a static tension that clung to the walls like smoke. Shadows gathered in the corners, spilling from the weak flicker of an old desk lamp that buzzed overhead.
He hadn’t changed.
Same hard lines to his face. Same sharp jaw, always clenched a little too tight. Same deliberate stillness that made everyone else seem like noise. And yet…
Something was wrong.
The warmth that used to live behind his eyes—gone. In its place, a cold obsidian stillness. No recognition, no remorse. Just the silence of someone who had watched something die and learned to live with it.
“You’ve come,” he said.
His voice was low. Precise. The syllables clipped and careful, like a man afraid of waking something up.
A tremor rippled through me.
The sound of his voice was too familiar, too wrong. It echoed inside me like a memory from a place I had never been. It wasn’t nostalgia. It wasn’t grief.
It was recognition.
“…How?” My voice broke like glass. “How is this possible?”
He didn’t answer. He only turned away, the weight of his presence shifting the atmosphere with him. He reached toward the desk—toward something I hadn’t noticed until now.
A folder.
Leather. Old. The kind of artifact that belonged to another century, another world. The edges were yellowed, cracked with time and something worse. Decay. As if time itself had tried to erase it and failed.
His fingers brushed the cover, and the air changed.
Not just in the way a bulb flickers before it dies. This was deliberate.
The light stuttered.
The shadows didn’t stretch—they writhed. They curled like fingers, their jagged shapes slithering across the walls, each one stretching toward us with slow, unnatural intent.
Then—tick.
My eyes snapped to the mantel. The old clock above the fireplace had moved once. Just once. The second hand twitched like a dying insect.
Then silence.
Oppressive. Suffocating. I could feel it in my bones.
“I don’t…” I tried to breathe, but my voice had shrunk to a threadbare whisper. “What’s happening?”
He still didn’t look at me.
Instead, he lifted the folder with slow, unsteady hands, holding it out to me like it was something sacred. Or cursed. My fingertips hovered inches away. The air around it buzzed—no, it vibrated, a low hum I could feel in the marrow of my teeth. My instincts screamed.
Run.
But I didn’t.
I took it.
The leather was cold. Heavier than it should’ve been. My fingers curled around it with dread I didn’t understand.
I opened it.
A photograph slid free and floated down like a feather. I caught it in trembling hands.
And the world stopped.
It was me.
Or—almost me.
The woman in the picture wore my face. Same bone structure. Same shape of the jaw. But her hair was shorter, darker. Her eyes were… hollow. Her smile thin and lifeless. There was no joy in her expression—just a vacancy. A placeholder for emotion.
Beside her stood Damian.
His hand was on her waist.
They looked like they belonged together.
No—more than that. They looked like they remembered being together.
But this moment… it had never happened. Not in any memory I possessed.
“This isn’t me,” I said. It was barely a whisper.
Damian looked at me then.
“But it was.”
The words slipped into the room like smoke through a crack in the wall—insidious, slow, contaminating everything.
My grip on the photograph tightened. My breath came fast, shallow.
“What is this?”
“It’s proof,” he said. “That the life you remember isn’t the only one you’ve lived.”
A low hum built in the air, like a generator switching on in the bowels of the Earth. I turned toward the clock.
The second hand began to spin.
Slow at first, then faster. A blur.
“No…” I shook my head. “No, this isn’t real. This can’t be real.”
Damian stepped closer. His shadow stretched toward me, longer than it should’ve. The walls pulsed with it. My vision narrowed.
“Then why are you dreaming about things you don’t remember?” he asked.
The words hit me like a needle to the skull.
The dreams.
The pieces I had buried deep, like whispers behind locked doors. Flashes of other people. Other places. My name spoken in voices I didn’t recognize.
And his name—Damian. Always there, lingering like an echo.
“I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
The room shuddered.
Glass shattered.
The desk lamp exploded in a burst of sparks, raining shards to the floor. The shadows along the walls screamed. I could hear them now. A language that made no sense and too much sense all at once.
“The timeline,” Damian hissed. “It’s rejecting me.”
I stumbled back.
“What?”
“This world exists because it was rewritten. Someone changed it. But I wasn’t meant to be here.” His voice trembled with something barely restrained. “And now, reality’s remembering what it forgot.”
Behind him, the window began to crack.
Hairline fractures ran through the glass. Beyond it, the city twisted. Buildings melted at the edges. People on the streets moved like broken film—jerky, stuttering, their limbs too long, too quick, too wrong.
My stomach flipped.
“What did you do?”
“I came back,” he said. “And now time knows.”
The walls trembled again. But something else caught my eye.
The mirror.
It stood beside the fireplace, tall, ornate. I turned—and froze.
My reflection didn’t move.
She stared at me. Same face. Same eyes.
But they weren’t mine.
They glittered with malice.
Then she smiled.
“This is what you f*****g get.”
The voice slithered through my mind like oil. Her smile widened—grotesque, almost inhuman.
A crack split the mirror.
Then another.
The surface spiderwebbed in an instant.
And then it exploded.
Glass burst into the air, slicing through skin. I screamed as sharp heat tore into my arms. Blood ran freely, hot and vibrant against the chill of the air.
The shadows roared.
“Eve!”
The voice was distant. Muted. It came from behind me, from nowhere, from everywhere.
I turned—but the world was gone.
---
Warmth.
The scent of cedar and smoke.
A fire crackled nearby. I could hear it before I saw it. My eyes fluttered open.
I was lying on a couch. Thick blanket. Soft cushions. My body ached. Bandages wrapped around my arms—tight, stained with red.
This wasn’t my apartment.
Bookshelves lined the walls, old and heavy with dust. The windows were fractured. Moonlight poured in through the cracks, silver and cold.
I tried to sit up—but pain screamed through my torso. A groan escaped my lips.
A figure stirred nearby.
He sat in a worn leather chair, elbows on his knees, fingers clasped together like he was holding himself still by force. Sandy hair. Broad shoulders. A square jaw set in tension.
His eyes met mine.
Hazel.
Dark.
Worried.
“You’re awake,” he said, voice low.
I swallowed. My throat ached. “Where… where am I?”
“My place,” he said.
His?
I tried to push myself upright again. My arms trembled.
“You were bleeding,” he added quickly. “I found you outside. You collapsed before you could tell me what happened.”
Found me.
The mirror. The voice. Damian.
My mind spun. Images rushed at me. None of them made sense.
My eyes narrowed on the man in the chair. His face looked familiar, but not enough. Like a face seen in a dream or a photograph long buried.
“I don’t…” I faltered. “Do I know you?”
He hesitated.
Something dark flickered across his expression.
“No,” he said softly.
But the way he looked at me—
The way his eyes clung to mine—
Said otherwise.
I stared at him. My pulse thudded in my ears.
One question slipped from my lips before I could stop it.
“Who are you?”
He didn’t answer.
He just sat there, staring at me with something like guilt in his eyes.
And all I knew, with a certainty that chilled my bones, was this:
Whoever he was—I didn’t know him.
But he knew me.
To Be Continued...
- Writer
