Reflections in the Dark

The city seemed to shrink as the shadows grew long, folding upon itself in wary silence. Lira and Jalen hurried back toward the inn, careful to walk in lamplight where it still flickered. The sputter of lanterns overhead was unreliable—sometimes a flame trembled and faded as if snuffed by unseen fingers, leaving only the thick, living dark.

Inside, the warmth was brittle, a thin defense. The few patrons huddled close to one another in the taproom, eyes cast askance like guilty children. Nora had barred the door, bolted it thrice, and set heavy candlesticks on every windowsill. Outside, rain smeared city lights into trembling threads of gold and iron.

Upstairs, Lira’s assigned room was painfully bare: a single bed, a warped dresser, one thin pane through which the world pressed with muffled menace. The curfew bell still echoed in her ears.

She tried to think of anything but the attic of her childhood—the hideous sense that someone waited just behind the trunk, breathing shallow and slow, knowing she was too afraid to look.

But thoughts have a way of breaking loose, and Duskmire was a place where thoughts bred shadows.

Sometime near midnight, a draft skittered beneath the door. Lira propped herself on one elbow, senses strung tight as wire. From the hall, faint footsteps shuffled, too slow to be any living guest. Then—a slow, deliberate scratching on the inside of the window.

She didn’t want to look. But her body moved—a compulsion born of dread. She reached for the candle at her bedside, but the wick guttered and died, snatched by some invisible chill. Now the room was nothing but suggestion: shape and threat.

The window’s glass bulged inward. Lira caught, for a second, a face—no, a mask—the same ghastly outline she’d seen in the square. Long and white as bone, empty black for eyes. The pane pulsed, then, with a hoarse sigh, the wall melted away, replaced by splintered wood and the unmistakable reek of dust and memory.

The attic. She was eight again, standing barefoot on cold boards, chest hollow with dread. The trunk squatted before her, iron-banded, its lock a grinning mouth. Behind her, something shifted—her own breathing, rasping, as if she were not alone.

A whisper curled through the gloom: “You left me here.”

Something clattered inside the trunk. Lira stumbled backwards—her heel scraping wood that was, impossibly, the rough grain of her childhood home. She squeezed her eyes shut, but the voice drowned her thoughts, insistent and inescapable: “You left me. You knew.”

She remembered the dream—always the same: the sound of her father’s boots thundered down the attic stairs, her mother crying, that trunk locked forever. No one explained what was taken away that day. No one ever opened it again.

Now, the lid creaked open. Fingers, so pale they seemed carved from the attic fog, unfurled. They beckoned. Behind them, the trunk was impossibly deep, a mouth opening to swallow her whole.

Lira fought the urge to scream. She steeled herself, stepping forward, voice trembling: “I am not eight. You have no power here.”

The trunk’s darkness seethed. Shadows spilled across the floor, writhing. That face—her own, terribly young, white and wild-eyed—stared back, mouth opening in a soundless wail.

She backed away, heart slamming, but her feet stuck to tar as thick as guilt. The sense of breathing, of something sharing the close, cold air, threatened to suffocate her—

And then—her hand found the bedside candle. A sliver of flint in her palm, the rough friction burning a memory to life. She struck once, twice—on the third, a spark caught. The dark recoiled, howling. The trunk slammed shut and vanished, the attic dissolving in sudden, gasping daylight.

She was back in her room, sprawled on the boards. The window was intact. Her heart thundered; her skin was slick with cold sweat.

From the corridor, a crash—the sound of Jalen bursting in, his face carved with frantic worry. He knelt, steadying her. “I heard you. Are you—did you see one?”

Lira nodded, shuddering. “The attic. The trunk. It tried to pull me under.”

He looked away, jaw trembling. “You weren’t the only one.”

They sat on the floor, sharing the trembling halflight from the stub of a candle. Jalen, usually so tightly wound, was unraveling—voice raw and small.

“There’s something I never told anyone,” he began. “My sister, Mina—she vanished during the dark, years ago. Lost to a specter. I always said it was quick…but it wasn’t.” He stared at the flicker of flame. “I saw her, Lira. Saw her fear take shape—a window she was too afraid to open. Something calling her from the street. She let it in. I was so scared—the thing that came for her looked like memories shaped into monsters.”

He pressed his sleeve to his eyes. “Sometimes I see her in the crowd. Or hear her voice in walls. That’s my fear—that it’s still waiting to finish the job.”

Lira, trembling, placed her hand on his. “We’re both haunted. But you faced it once and lived. That means something.”

A long silence, trembling with rain and the hush of shared secrets.

Later, sleep refused to come. Lira wrapped herself in a blanket and paced the tiny room. Her hands itched for distraction, and she found herself drawn to the warped dresser. She slid it aside—revealing, to her surprise, a loose board nearly hidden behind it.

She pried at it with the tip of a shoe. It groaned, finally giving way. Behind it: an old, battered book bound in blackened leather—a diary, pressed shut by time and dust. She thumbed it open, squinting at the cramped, tight script.

Jalen, roused by the noise, joined her in reading. They turned page after page, discovering not the idle musings of an innkeeper but the memoirs of a former Warden—the city’s self-avowed protector.

The earliest entries were imploring, hopeful:

Duskmire was not always this way. We meant to protect it from nightmares, not birth them. The Old Magic binds fear so the city can survive. Every ritual draws darkness out, locks it in stone and mortar—

But the lines soon darkened;

It grows inside these walls—feeds on the dregs of what we dare not name. The more we cast out, the more it hungers. People’s terrors become flesh. It is no longer protection—it is harvest.

There is something in the Well at the city’s heart. Not just our fears, but an entity that gathers them—feeds, grows, commands. It uses us. We are vessels and victims both.

Another passage:

The more the city fears, the stronger the curse. The specters unite, conspire. I see them whisper in shadow, gather near the tunnels. And now their master wears my mask, stalks my own dreams. Forgive me. I tried—

The rest trailed away, abruptly ending in scrawls and dried tears.

Jalen shut the book, voice edged with dread. “So it’s not just nightmares—there’s something behind them. It uses our fear against us. The people panic, the curse grows stronger.”

Lira nodded, mind whirling, heart thumping with hope and horror. “If we can find this Well—whatever it is—maybe we can stop it. Or weaken it.”

Thunder rolled above the city. Outside, specters flickered at the edge of lamplight, gathering in unnatural congregation. In the diary, one word repeated—unity. The curse thrived not only because people were afraid, but because the city’s fear was shared, joined, manipulated by something ancient and knowing.

Lira steeled herself. “We need answers, Jalen. Tomorrow, we start with the tunnels.”

He nodded, clinging to resolve. “And whatever shape our fears take again—we won’t face them alone.”

A shudder of hope crept into the candlelit gloom, wavering, but refusing to die. Below, the city moaned with the sound of distant, gathering nightmares. But above, in their fragile circle of light, Lira and Jalen made their first small stand against the darkness.