Date: Unknown

  Era: Late 1800s, Industrial England

  Requestor: A girl named Annabelle Wren, age 16

  It began with a whisper through a broken music box.

  Annabelle West had no one left. Her mother had died when she was still a child, leaving her with nothing but a rusted music box and faint memories of lullabies and warmth. The rest of her life had been swallowed by factory soot and the stinging pain of survival. She was a factory girl, small and soft-spoken, with calloused fingers and soot-smeared cheeks. Her world was noise and danger, long shifts and bruises hidden beneath threadbare sleeves.

  She worked twelve-hour days under the crooked gaze of Mr. Gallows, a man whose name matched the noose-tight grimness of his soul. His cruelty was well known, and his eyes followed the girls like wolves watched wounded deer. When Annabelle refused his leering advances, his wrath turned sharp. He docked her wages for imagined mistakes, reassigned her to the most hazardous tasks, and whispered venom into the ears of the other girls until they spat her name like poison. She bore it all in silence.

  Until the day the machine exploded.

  He had ordered her to fix it, though she was not trained, though she had protested. Sparks flew. Metal groaned. Then fire. Screaming. When they dragged her out, her arm was torn and bloodied, her life now marked by a ragged scar and the knowledge that she had been used and thrown away. The factory denied liability. Gallows denied everything. No one listened. No one believed.

  That night, alone in her dim boarding room, Annabelle sat on her narrow cot, her injured arm bandaged in dirty cloth, her soul a hollow vessel of pain. She reached for her mother’s old music box. The crank was rusted, the mirror cracked. Still, she turned it with trembling fingers slick with blood. The melody sputtered like static, off-key and warping.

  Then the tune reversed.

  She stared into the little mirror, and what stared back was not her reflection.

  A woman stood within the glass. Pale, with hair like powdered ash and eyes the color of fresh-spilled blood. In her arms she clutched a plush fox, its stitched mouth pulled wide in a crooked grin that twitched slightly as though it wanted to speak.

  The woman said nothing at first. Then the mirror began to glow with faint red light, and words etched themselves into the cracked surface as if clawed there by unseen hands.

  "Do you wish for revenge?"

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  Annabelle did not hesitate. Her voice was hoarse, barely a whisper.

  "Yes."

  The surface of the mirror rippled like water. The pale woman stepped through.

  She was smaller than Annabelle expected, childlike, almost delicate, but there was something ancient about her presence, like winter wind howling through dead trees. She stood still for a long moment, her eyes searching Annabelle’s face.

  "His death will not come," the woman said softly, "but he will beg for it."

  She stepped forward and took Annabelle’s hand in hers. Her touch was cold, but not cruel. Something passed between them, not pain, not loss, but a kind of surrender. Annabelle felt herself exhale a breath she had not known she was holding. Her soul, or something like it, slipped gently from her body into the girl’s care.

  "For now," the woman said, " I will keep it safe."

  The music box pulsed red.

  The pact was sealed.

  That night, the whispers began.

  Mr. Gallows heard them first in the factory, faint and fractured. The laughter of the working girls reversed itself, giggling turning into garbled groans. The looms thudded in rhythm with a heartbeat not his own. The music box tune echoed from somewhere in the walls. His reflection, once smug and self-assured, began to move independently, blinking when he did not.

  At home, he found plush toys he did not own. Small animals with patchwork fur and eyes too human in their glassy sheen. One sat on his pillow. Another in his boot. He threw them into the fire. They came back burned, singed, still smiling, some with tears stitched into their cheeks.

  He stopped sleeping.

  Each night, he would wake in screams to find her there, the woman from the mirror. Sitting quietly at the foot of his bed, her ember eyes fixed on him, her plush fox giggling softly in the darkness.

  She never spoke.

  She did not need to.

  By the end of the week, he had smashed every mirror in his home. On the final night, he tried to claw her out of one, raking his nails down the glass until blood smeared his reflection. His screams never stopped.

  And then he vanished.

  Months passed. The factory changed hands. Repairs were made. During the renovation, the workers ripped up the old floorboards and found things buried beneath.

  Dozens of plush toys. Bloodstained. Torn. Each one stitched shut, their bellies stuffed with something hard.

  Teeth. Human teeth.

  Annabelle Wren’s body was found in her boarding room soon after, curled on her cot, the music box in her lap still playing that reversed, haunting melody. Her face was serene, at peace, as though whatever storm had once lived inside her had passed.

  Her soul was gone but not lost.

  The woman, Lily, stood on the other side of the veil now, holding Annabelle’s spirit like a candle in her small hands as they passed together through the rift of time and judgment. The plush fox followed in silence, its stitched smile growing ever so slightly wider.

  Lily turned to her, voice soft and steady.

  When the world ignores your screams,

  "I will hear you."

  "If your hatred burns bright enough,"

  "I will come."

  "But revenge comes at a cost."

  "And no one escapes the fire."

  Annabelle, soul-light dim and quiet, did not speak.

  "Two graves are always dug" Lily added after a pause. "One for the damned. And one for the one who damned them."

  The fox twitched once in her arms.

  Then smiled.

  Status: Revenge fulfilled. Soul pending judgment

  Case : Closed