The Dream That Dreams You Back
Before the Hollow ever bled, Elias Vale stood at the threshold of forgetting.
His breath fogged against the mirror that bore no reflection.
He had come far—too far, perhaps. Behind him, the Clocktower wept in intervals not measured by time, but by loss. With each chime, a name fell from his memory, soft as ash.
The trial was clear now: not to remember, but to remain.
"The Mirror-Woman awaited him."
She sat cloaked in glass-thread veils, eyes polished like obsidian rain. Around her, the chamber multiplied. Reflections spiraled into infinity—each a different version of Elias: laughing, burning, begging, dead.
"You seek the Fourth Name," she said. "But you have not earned your first."
He didn't answer. Instead, he stepped forward and placed his hand on the cold, breathing glass.
The Mirror-Woman split into seven, and each copy whispered a prophecy:
- One foretold a city devoured by silence.
- One wept ink and spoke of a boy buried in a name not his.
- One smiled and said, "You were never born. Only written."
The real Elias stood still knowing the rules and difficulty of the game .
"Which one is true?" he asked.
"All of them," they replied in chorus. "And none."
Deeper still, the Fifth Layer crumbled.
Archivists with tongues torn out scribbled blindly in blood and dust.
Their language had turned against them—every sentence spoken aloud summoned a plague of memory. Words, once sacred, now unmade the speaker.
Elias walked through them unnoticed. He remembered a simpler time—one not real, perhaps—where his mother lit candles to chase the dark away. Lavender wax. Warm tea. A book without a title.
*"Do not forget that,"* she had said. *"Not even in dreams."*
But dreams here dreamed him back.
The Oracle watched from the Hollow's throat.
A serpent of bones and static, wearing a blindfold made of childhood lullabies.
"Your name is a door," it hissed. "You wish to open it—but doors open both ways."
Elias asked, "What price?"
"Everything false that ever kept you sane."
The Oracle reached into its maw and withdrew a glass casket filled with thoughts that weren't his. Future children who might bear his face. Wars fought in his shadow. Lovers who only existed in unspoken timelines.
"You must choose what to keep," it said. "And what to forget."
He chose memory.
Even if it meant madness.
The Mirror War began as a ripple.
One copy of Elias refused the cycle. Refused the Fourth Name.
He tore his reflection apart and walked backward through time, dragging shards of his unmade self behind him.
Reality cracked like an old lens. Cities forgot their own architecture.
People awoke with the wrong memories—or none.
Elias stood on the last remaining clock hand and whispered, "Let the world know my name as I drown."
Then he fell.
But even falling has its memory.
he suddenly recalled that people playing this game tends to forget things no matter how much they tend to recall.
Beneath the Mnemonic Abyss, he awoke.
Not in fire, but in stillness.
His body a cage of thought. His skin a map of lost words.
Above him: the Hollow sky, stitched with stars no one had ever named.
He was alone—until a mirror drifted past.
Not silver. Not glass. Just still water.
He looked. He expected nothing.
But the boy reflected back smiled.
It was the first real thing he'd seen in ages inside the game.
**And in that moment, Elias remembered.**
Not everything.
But enough.
He rose.
Not whole.
But real.