The mirror cracked with a sharp snap, a spiderweb of fractures spreading across its surface like a wound refusing to heal.
Elias stumbled back, hand instinctively reaching for a gun that wasn't there. Only the cold weight of the pendant, a shard of broken mirror strung on black cord, pressed against his chest.
In the mirror's broken reflection, something was moving.
A child's shape.
Thin arms. Bare feet. Head tilted slightly sideways.
The figure stood in the center of the shattered frame. Where a reflection should be, a child stared at him from the other side of the glass.
No, through it.
His mouth went dry.
"Liam," Elias whispered. The name fell from his lips like an open wound.
The boy's head twitched, like a puppet's on failing strings.
Then it began to walk toward him.
It stepped out of the mirror without sound, as if crossing from one world to another was as easy as a breath. Its skin was pale and damp, like paper left out in the rain. Thin, translucent, sickly. Veins like black ink etched across its neck and temples.
But it was the mouth that made Elias freeze.
Where lips should be, there was only a dark X-stitched shut with something that looked like shadow made solid.
The child lifted a trembling hand and pointed at him.
Elias couldn't breathe.
"You're not real," he muttered.
The creature tilted its head, eyes glinting with obsidian glass, no pupils, no iris, just twin orbs that reflected everything: the room, the mirror behind it, and Elias himself, standing alone.
Then the whispers began.
They came from everywhere and nowhere.
"You watched him break."
"You made him speak."
"You left him alone."
"You fed him to the mirror."
The voice was Elias's own.
Layered. Distorted. Folded backward.
The child took another step.
Glass cracked beneath its feet—but there was no glass on the ground. The sound came from inside Elias's head.
He backed against a wall, breath ragged.
"No," he said. "No, I didn't... I tried to help him."
The creature's mouth twitched beneath its stitched X. A tremor, a spasm. Its hands flexed.
It raised one arm and touched its face, fingers dragging down the invisible seams.
The whisper became a scream, Liam's scream.
Elias dropped to one knee, clutching his ears. Blood dripped from his nose.
Then he saw it on the floor. A shard from the broken mirror. Sharp. Clean. Real.
He grabbed it.
"You're not Liam," he growled through gritted teeth. "You're what's left of my guilt. What it turned into when I buried the truth."
The Hollow Witness paused.
Its head snapped upright.
It opened its arms wide, exposing its stitched mouth fully.
The threads began to unravel.
Dark mist leaked from the tears, not smoke, but memory: Elias's voice, over and over, "You saw it, didn't you, Liam? Say something. Please."
The world blurred.
Walls bent inward. The temple around them turned gray and featureless, like reality had been sucked into a black-and-white photograph. Elias stood in the middle of it all, breath heaving.
He raised the shard.
"If I bury this… again… I'll lose myself."
He stepped forward. One foot. Then another.
The Hollow Witness hissed, retreating. Its eyes flickered with fragmented faces—Liam, the detective chief, Elias's own face twisted in grief.
Elias pressed the shard to the creature's forehead.
"I'm sorry," he said, not just to it. But to the boy. To the past.
And then, he pushed.
The Hollow Witness shattered like glass dropped in slow motion.
It didn't scream.
It exhaled a long, breathless sigh.
Mirror shards scattered, dancing in the air before falling gently to the floor. The mist vanished. Color returned.
And at Elias's feet, resting like a dropped tooth, was a single cracked sliver of glass.
He picked it up. It felt cold. Familiar. Wrong.
WHITE-TIER ECHO: HOLLOW WITNESS — VANQUISHED
Tether Item Acquired: "Memory Fragment (Guilt-Bound)"
System Notice: Sanity Resistance +1. Mirror Affinity Unlocked.
Elias staggered out of the broken temple into a dead wind.
His mind screamed for silence.
But far in the distance, across the ashen plains, he saw movement.
Something Red was watching.
And it was smiling.
END OF CHAPTER 2