There is a room which appears whenever the world has been looked at for too long.
It is a small room, though its dimensions change when measured, and a man sits inside it upon a chair whose steel spine has begun to rust through the upholstery. Above him, a white light burns with the clean, patient cruelty of something that has never needed to sleep, while behind him the mirror keeps its second room hidden.
They used to come often.
They arrived in pairs, or in threes, carrying little offerings of paper and metal, and they spoke to him with the careful warmth reserved for the sick, the dangerous, and the already condemned. They smiled when they entered, because smiling was part of the ritual, and the man smiled back because there were so few things left in the room that still belonged to him.
But the smiles did not survive.
One by one, they came back carrying different faces, and the corners of their mouths had learned the downward road. They asked him for small things first, then for things which had never been possible, then for things which became possible only after being spoken aloud. The man would not give them what they wanted, and so they took away the chair, then the hour, then the name by which he had once answered.
After that, they left him with the light.
Something watched from behind the mirror, although the glass reflected only the room, and something else moved through the walls, touching each object with a wet finger and deciding what it had always been. The first kept every moment. The second kept changing them. Between them, the man remained, neither remembered nor rewritten completely, and therefore impossible to finish.
He learned not to look at the mirror.
He learned to count the pauses between footsteps, to hear when a smile had been rehearsed, and to recognize the instant a friendly voice became a locked door. He learned that a face could be erased without removing the eyes, and that a room could be opened without allowing anyone to leave.
Then the Watching One found him.
Or remembered finding him.
It placed a hand against the other side of the glass, and all the old smiles stirred in their graves.
“Keep one,” it said.
The man did not ask which one. He had been alone too long to mistake an instruction for an invitation.
Now he waits beneath the white light, and the mirror waits with him. Sometimes the room trembles with the static of another version. Sometimes the walls forget their corners. Sometimes a smile appears in the flaking paint, though no mouth is there to make it.
And sometimes, when you look away, the man is no longer sitting in the chair.
Hello, friend.
The room is awful, but it is not yet closed. Take my hand before the other one remembers that you were never here, and let us go while the Watching One is still looking.
Just a quick note before you leave: this may well be the final story I upload directly to CivitAI for a while—but woah hey calm down no, I’m not disappearing from the site, not by a long shot— and this is very much a good thing.
I’ve been working extremely hard behind the scenes on something much larger for my story work, and I’m finally getting very close to being able to properly show it off. It’s going to change how I publish, present, and build on these stories going forward in a pretty massive way.
I’ll have some very, very exciting announcements in the near future, so keep posted. This isn’t an ending so much as me finally getting ready to open the door to what comes next.