The Mind's Mirror

They say memory is a fickle thing-slippery, unstable, a liar with good intentions. It twists, it bends, it protects. It molds horror into something tolerable. Rewrites agony into fiction. Distorts truth until it's palatable.

Mallory Arabella Deveza once believed her mind was simply broken. That the flickering fragments scattered inside her were nothing more than the aftershocks of trauma. Noise. Static. Ghosts of pain her brain refused to process all at once.

But the truth was worse.

Because some minds don't just forget.
Some minds bury.

Now, after the night her world shattered, she was accused of an unthinkable crime-branded unstable, delusional, and dangerous. The court didn't send her to prison. Instead, she was remanded to the cold, clinical halls of St. Celestine's Psychiatric Hospital. There, time stands still, truth is a shifting shadow, and therapy feels more like punishment wrapped in sterile kindness.

Something terrible happened.
Someone ended up dead.
And her memories-the real ones-are beginning to bleed through the cracks.

She thought the past was a blur. A fog. But it wasn't fog at all. It was smoke. And where there's smoke, there's fire.

And somewhere deep inside her mind...

Something is still burning.

Sometimes, the mind's mirror shows a crack... and sometimes, something stares back through it.