The mirror convulsed.

  Not shattered—recomposed, rethreaded into something profane. The child's reflection devoured itself, spiraling upward into a monumental portrait, as vast and hungering as a cathedral's forgotten gate. Its surface thickened—oil paints writhing beneath the skin, like veins gorged with fevered memories.

  No color yet. No shape. Only the tremor of an unnamed agony, slick with anticipation.

  Stella walked. Not out of will. Not out of rebellion. She walked because movement was the only antidote to stagnation, because stillness was surrender.

  The dark realm yawned around her, stitched from mirrors cracked along the seams of forgotten constellations. Each shard held malformed reflections of herself—faces eroded of features, torsos misshapen like collapsed stars.

  Behind her, Somebody followed, the way a caretaker tends a corpse before the funeral. A silhouette masquerading as mercy.

  Then—

  he shifted.

  Business casual, like a salesman who never sold anything but grief. A suit stitched from collapsed galaxies. A clipboard birthed from static. A pen sharp enough to sign eulogies.

  A therapist, in the way a blade is a surgeon.

  Somebody (voice like moths burning in a lampshade):

  "She was born between a sigh and a silence. A mind inoculated with comprehension before her gums had tasted hunger."

  The portrait twitched.

  Paints congealed into coherence— a scene: A diminutive child, curled around a notebook, drowning in dreams far too large for her ribcage.

  Somebody (mock-penitent):

  "Dreaming was her sovereign sin. Photographic memory was a simple cheap parlor trick. She carried visions too vivid for mortals, dreams so raw they threatened to hatch new universes."

  Another shudder.

  The painting sharpened: A five-year-old Stella, barely more than breath and bone, standing beside a canvas that pulsed with forbidden architectures, places no god had sanctioned.

  Brushstrokes so blasphemously precise they seemed to rewrite the laws of causality.

  Somebody (clicking his pen like a ticking noose):

  "Ah... The prodigy mechanism. The coin-slot messiah. They fed you adoration with one hand and siphoned marrow with the other. Isn't it effortless? To harvest genius before it learns to say 'no'?"

  Stella's pace slowed. The sorrow ghosting her face was not emotion. It was erosion, slow and inevitable as tides grinding down a monument.

  Each step closer— the floor rippled, not with water, but with compressed recollections, too exhausted to scream.

  ? ? ?

  The portrait dissolved—liquefying into—

  A cluttered dining room.

  Wallpaper blistering like diseased skin. An overhead bulb flickering in epileptic spasms.

  Tiny Stella hunched over a table. Her small hands—furious, frantic—birthing impossible cities, faces too alive to be inventions.

  Her parents loomed.

  Their mouths stretched into permanent grimaces, too wide, too white. Their faces obscured, their humanity dissolved into expectation.

  Mother's Voice (warped and syrupy):

  "Faster, darling. The gallery wants something new."

  Father's Voice (steady as an executioner):

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  "Think of all the people you'll make happy. Good girls make good profits."

  Stella (barely audible, barely there):

  "But... I'm tired."

  Mother (cooing, venomous):

  "Tired means you're doing it right, sweet thing."

  Another blank canvas shoved at her— an altar waiting for a sacrifice.

  The portrait hemorrhaged back into black.

  Somebody (whispering like knives slipping into velvet):

  "They built cathedrals from your sinews, Stella. And when the ceremonies ended, they left your bones in the rafters."

  He straightened his therapist jacket with a flourish. The gesture meant nothing. Like trying to iron wrinkles into a corpse.

  The new scene bled into view—

  A gallery. White walls. White lights. White lies.

  Wine glasses clinked like tiny, fragile executions.

  Adults buzzed around her paintings, their laughter sharp enough to strip bark from trees. Not a soul looked at Stella herself. Only her artifacts.

  In a corner—

  Stella sat.

  Small. Collapsed into the folds of a chair too big for her. Her dress wilted like an offering no one would claim.

  Breathing. Existing. Drowning. Quietly.

  The portrait melted again.

  Preparing the next incision.

  Somebody (voice rising, mirthless):

  "Greed, child, is the most eloquent prayer humanity ever learned. You think they cared for your light? No. They wanted a candle they could burn at both ends."

  He smiled.

  But there was no warmth. Only the mechanical satisfaction of a butcher closing shop.

  ? ? ?

  Somebody (his voice curling into the seams of the void):

  "However... I am no blind priest of moralities."

  He smiles—a fracture of teeth stitched from absence.

  "Curiosity is my marrow, Stella. And yes... greed, too."

  "Not for power. Not for fame. Not for the paltry trinkets mortals spill blood over."

  "But for knowledge."

  His ring finger snapped—soft, sharp, a guillotine against the silence. The theater of memory twisted—rewound—mutated.

  Somebody's shape churned, his figure contorting into the mockery of an old man: Papery skin sagging in grotesque sincerity, wrinkles etched with counterfeit sorrow, hollow sockets where eyes should have mourned.

  It was a human costume poorly stitched—lazy, almost disdainful.

  A trickster too bored to pretend properly.

  "Shall we dive, child?" "Into the womb of Avaritia?"

  ? ? ?

  Somebody (his false mouth wet with velvet and venom):

  "It's strange, isn't it?"

  "This hunger. This gnawing. This ache not for survival, but for more."

  "They gather. They hoard. They chase mirages."

  "Not because they need—but because they were programmed to need."

  The fake old man's voice rattled like old coins in a dying purse.

  "Once, it kept them alive. Once, more meat, more shelter, more blood meant another heartbeat through winter."

  "Now?"

  He scoffed—an ugly sound, dry as a moth's final death against glass.

  "Now they are slaves to instincts that outlived their purpose."

  The skies of the portrait wept black.

  "They blame themselves for their insatiability."

  "But it is not their fault. It never was."

  "They were born with the hunger seeded deep— a curse written in protein and bone."

  He leered.

  "And like all obsolete gods, instinct demands tribute long after its altar has rotted."

  His false skin crumbled.

  The hollowed corpse of a man dissolved into constellations, reforming into Somebody's true form—void stitched in winking static.

  He tapped his pen once against the clipboard— A heartbeat hammering against the throat of inevitability.

  ? ? ?

  Somebody (voice gentler now, almost reverent):

  "Love is a treacherous thing, Stella."

  "It is not a gift. It is not a virtue. It is... a brand."

  He circled her.

  Each footstep bending the world slightly inward, as if gravity itself preferred his company.

  "Your parents loved you."

  "Yes."

  "Enough to chain you inside their trembling palms, terrified that if they loosened their grip—" "—you would slip between their fingers like stolen light."

  Paint splattered the floor—rorschachs of guilt blooming in reverse.

  "They mistook possession for protection."

  "They baptized their greed as 'opportunity.'"

  "They perfumed their terror as 'love.'"

  The portrait twitched, showing the blur of her mother and father— soft-focus smiles stretched a little too wide, a little too desperate.

  Somebody (voice sharpening into silk-edged pity):

  "They weren't monsters, little one."

  "Just desperate creatures drowning in small, ugly sins—regret, envy, terror."

  He leaned closer, shadows bleeding from his body like ink from a burst artery.

  "Your mother—do you remember her brittle lullabies? Fingers that once fluttered over piano keys now trembling over grocery lists?"

  "She saw your paintings and thought, 'This... this is the concert I never played.'"

  "She kissed your forehead not to bless you—"

  "—but to beg forgiveness for the symphonies she murdered inside herself."

  The portrait snapped—showing a young mother, cradling Stella far too tightly, as if weight could anchor brilliance.

  Somebody drifted sideways, voice hollowing further:

  "And your father—"

  He gestured to the memory—stained with wine, art, and oblivion.

  "A man who bartered his dreams for smaller debts."

  "He saw your genius not as a miracle—"

  "—but as a lighthouse blinking through the fog of his failures."

  "Not a daughter."

  "A second chance with smaller hands."

  The mirrors quivered, trembling with images: Stella displayed like relics in a mausoleum while her true self withered into forgotten margins.

  Somebody (smiling without mouth or mercy):

  "They were afraid of you, too."

  "A child who spoke fluent galaxy while they mumbled in gravity."

  He laughed—a sound like wire scraping porcelain.

  "And because they feared you..." "They loved you harder."

  "As if love could sandpaper the sharpness of a mind born too wide for their narrow cage."

  He tossed the clipboard into the sky— The heavens swallowed it like a starving thing.

  Ink rained upward, stitching new stars across a sick universe.

  Somebody (whispering now):

  "They loved you, Stella."

  "Just enough—"

  "—to break you beautifully."