When the room went dark she heard her name. It was soft, a deliberate whisper threading through the silence like smoke curling around her ears. Mara…


Her eyes snapped open. The bedroom of Devereaux Manor—the abandoned estate at the edge of town—was pitch black. Not ordinary darkness, though. This darkness was thick, alive, pressing against her skin like a living thing. She could feel it breathing.


“Mara?” she whispered. Her voice quivered. No answer. Just a faint rustle, like fabric brushing the floorboards. Then came a laugh—not human exactly, but eerily familiar, an echo of her own voice.


Her phone lay dead on the bedside table. The lamp’s bulb had blown—or perhaps it had never been functional. The air vibrated with a low hum, resonating through the floorboards and into her bones.


“Mara… come closer.”


Her feet moved before her mind could protest. Shadows deepened, curling and twisting around her, and then light exploded: molten silver shards illuminating a room that should not exist.


She was no longer in her bedroom. She was in a library, impossibly vast. Shelves stretched endlessly, stacked with books whose spines glowed faintly, each embossed with her name.


On a desk in the center lay a journal, open. Her handwriting stared back at her: I am waiting for you.


A figure formed from the shadows, tall and thin, featureless yet hauntingly familiar. Around its neck glimmered a pendant—the same one she had buried as a child under the roots of an oak tree.


“You remember,” it said, voice layered with echoes of a thousand versions of herself. “You were meant to stay away. But you came anyway.”


The library pulsed with her heartbeat. Books fluttered, whispering secrets of lives never lived. She could see herself in different forms: a traveler across the world, a lover betrayed, a child who never grew afraid. Beneath it all, the pendant glowed, a lighthouse in the storm.


“You must choose,” the figure said. “Every path. Every possibility. Once you step forward, you cannot return unchanged.”


Mara swallowed her fear. A memory surfaced unbidden: herself as a child, laughing in a sun-drenched garden, the pendant clutched in her hand. “I… I want to see,” she whispered.


The floor vanished beneath her.