The first time Elara saw the mirror, she thought it was a trick of the light. It stood in the corner of her grandmother’s attic, dust-covered and forgotten, its frame dark wood carved with strange symbols that seemed to shift when she looked at them too long. She had been searching for old photo albums when she stumbled upon it, the floor creaking beneath her feet as if the house itself were holding its breath. Curious, she brushed off the surface, revealing a silvered glass that reflected not her face, but something else—trees, tall and twisted, their branches reaching like skeletal fingers toward a sky filled with two moons. The air around the mirror felt colder, almost alive. She stepped back, heart pounding, but the image remained. When she touched the glass, the world around her seemed to ripple, like a pond disturbed by a pebble. That night, she dreamt of the trees again. In the dream, she walked through a forest where the leaves whispered secrets in a language she almost understood. Shadows moved just beyond her vision, and every time she turned, they vanished. She woke up with a strange taste in her mouth, like ash and iron. The mirror was still there, waiting. Over the following weeks, Elara began to notice other things. A door that wasn’t there before in her apartment, a faint echo of laughter from an empty room, a photograph of herself that didn’t match her current appearance. She started to explore the mirror more carefully, learning that it only showed glimpses of another world—a place that felt both familiar and alien. She could hear voices, distant and muffled, as if someone on the other side was trying to reach her. One evening, she found a journal inside the attic, bound in cracked leather and written in a hand that wasn’t hers. The pages described a woman who lived in the same house, who had also discovered the mirror. The entries spoke of a "threshold" between worlds, a fragile line that could be crossed but never fully understood. The last entry was dated the day before Elara arrived. The final words were: “They’re watching. They always were.” She began to visit the mirror more often, sometimes staying for hours, staring into its depths. The other world was always changing—sometimes a city of glass towers, sometimes a desolate wasteland under a violet sun. But each time, she felt a presence, a silent observer just beyond the veil. It wasn’t hostile, but it was aware. Then came the day she saw herself. Not in the mirror, but in the reflection of a window. She turned, expecting to see her own face, but instead, she saw a version of herself standing behind her, eyes hollow and expressionless. When she reached out, the figure simply smiled and stepped through the glass, vanishing into the mirror’s depths. Panic set in. She ran to the mirror, but it no longer showed the trees or the cities. Now, it reflected the attic exactly as it had been before she ever found it. No sign of the other world. No trace of the figure. Only silence. She tried to find the journal again, but it was gone. The attic had changed—what was once a cluttered space of forgotten items was now neat and clean, as if no one had ever lived there. The mirror had been removed, leaving only a circular patch on the wall, pale and untouched. Elara left the house that night, carrying nothing but a single photograph of the mirror. She told no one what she had seen, but the questions haunted her. Had she truly crossed into another world? Or had it been a dream, a hallucination born from loneliness and grief? In the months that followed, she would sometimes see a shadow in her periphery, a flicker of movement that disappeared when she turned. She would hear her own voice speaking in a language she didn’t know, echoing from an unseen source. And in the quietest moments, she would look into the mirror of her bathroom and see something behind her—just for a second, just long enough to make her heart skip. The mirror had left a mark, not on the world, but on her. And though she couldn’t explain it, she knew one thing for certain: the threshold had not closed. It had only waited.