Every morning, Nara woke up before her alarm rang.

And every morning, without fail, her mother would pass by her door and mutter, "You’ll be late again."

It didn’t matter that she was early. It didn’t matter that Nara hadn’t overslept in weeks. The phrase came like clockwork, as though someone hit play on a recording. The exact intonation. The same tired shuffle of footsteps fading away.

She stopped replying. She just listened. She watched. She noted.

In class, her seatmate Mia would ask, "Did you do the homework?" at precisely 7:52 a.m. Whether it was raining, sunny, or exams week, the question came.

Nara started answering differently. Saying absurd things like, "I baked it into a pie," or "I mailed it to Mars." But Mia never reacted.

Just a beat of silence. Then: "Haha, you’re so weird, Nara."

Every time.

It began to gnaw at her—this feeling of repetition, of things running on a loop, as if the world was stitched together by threads too tight to unravel.

Then one day, the thread snapped.

A new student walked into class. That wasn’t unusual. Transfers happened. But this one—Iven—made her skin buzz before he even spoke. His presence felt wrong. Off-script.

He didn’t wait for the teacher’s introduction. He walked straight to her, eyes locked like magnets. He sat in the empty chair beside her—the one no one ever sat in.

"You’ve been watching everything," he said quietly, almost bored. "But you missed something."

Nara stared. "Excuse me?"

He leaned closer. "You forgot to ask: what happens when a thought starts thinking back?"

She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Something tightened in her chest like a string being pulled too far.

She wrote about him that night.

> Iven. Transfer student. Said strange things. Couldn’t predict his words.

She closed the notebook. In the morning, the ink was gone. Not smeared. Not erased. Just gone. As if she never wrote it.

Mia asked about the homework at 7:52 a.m. again. Nara said nothing. And Mia didn’t respond. Just stared forward, smiling like a wind-up doll.

Trees outside swayed in perfect rhythm. The same two birds chirped, looped, chirped again.

Something cracked inside her. Nara didn’t go home after school.

She walked.

Past the bakery with the identical pastries.

Past the man who always dropped his coin at the same spot near the fountain.

Past the dog that barked once, then sat and stared, unblinking.

It all ticked like clockwork.

Except her.

And Iven.

She found him at the edge of town, where the sidewalk broke into grass and silence. He stood there like he’d been waiting since before she was born.

“You noticed,” he said.

“No one changes,” she whispered. “Not even the wind.”

“That’s because it isn’t wind. It’s a thought, mimicking motion.”

She hesitated. “Whose thought?”

He turned. For the first time, his eyes weren’t just watching—they were pleading.

“That’s the question, Nara. Whose dream is this? Yours—or mine?”

The sky flickered.

Like a dying bulb.

Nara reached out to touch his sleeve, but her fingers passed through him like smoke. He didn’t flinch. Just whispered: “Be careful. The more you remember, the less real you become to them.”

Behind her, the town exhaled in one long, mechanical sigh.

And Nara finally asked herself—

What if I’m the only one who’s not real?

That night, Nara didn’t sleep.

She didn’t even try.

Because every time she closed her eyes, she heard the thoughts. Not voices—thoughts. A chorus, murmuring behind the wallpaper of her reality.

“She’s slipping.”

“Run a reset.”

“Not yet. She’s close.”

She opened her notebook again. The one where she tried to write Iven’s name. The pages were blank. All of them.

Except the last.

It now read:

"DON’T WRITE ME DOWN. THEY TRACE INK."

Her hands trembled. She flipped back and forth, as if she could catch the handwriting mid-fade. But nothing changed. No movement. No smudge.

Just that one sentence, etched in stillness.

The next morning, her mother didn’t say “You’ll be late again.”

She didn’t say anything at all.

She just stood outside Nara’s door, hand hovering over the knob, head slightly tilted… waiting.

Nara stayed silent under the covers.

Her mother eventually walked away, but her footsteps no longer shuffled—they clicked, like the gears of a mannequin.

At school, Mia wasn’t in her seat.

No one was.

The room was full—but every student sat frozen, mid-blink, mid-smile. As though someone had paused the world in the middle of a breath.

Only Iven was moving.

He stood at the whiteboard, scribbling frantic symbols that looked like both letters and diagrams. Like a map of thought itself. His hands were stained with ink that shimmered like oil in sunlight.

"You’re awake during the rendering," he said without turning. "This place doesn’t know what to do with you anymore."

"What is this place?" Nara asked.

Iven finally turned, eyes bloodshot. “It’s not a simulation. That would be easier. It’s worse. It’s a self. A consciousness, dreaming in all directions. You’re inside someone.”

He tapped the board.

“And they’re starting to notice you don’t belong.”

Nara stared at the symbols. Some of them began to rearrange, shifting into familiar letters, forming a question she hadn’t asked aloud:

DO YOU WANT TO WAKE UP?

She blinked.

And when she opened her eyes, she wasn’t in the classroom anymore.

She was in a room with no doors.

Only mirrors.

Each one showed a different version of her.

Smiling. Crying. Screaming. Sleeping.

One of them looked back—and moved when she didn’t.

It raised a hand and pressed it to the glass.

Then mouthed one word:

“RUN.”

Nara backed away from the mirror.

The other her—the one inside—didn’t.

It kept its hand on the glass, watching her with wide, desperate eyes. Its mouth opened again, silently mouthing a second word.

“NOW.”

The glass shimmered like water, then cracked.

A single hairline fracture, slicing through the reflection’s face. Then another. And another.

All around the room, the other mirrors began to tremble. Each version of her moved independently—some trying to scream, others pressing against the barrier like caged animals. One of them was laughing. One of them was melting.

She turned—but there was nowhere to go.

No doors. No seams. No ceiling—just a void above, stretching like an endless gray sky.

She screamed.

Not out of fear.

Out of defiance.

The glass exploded.

Shards froze midair, hanging like stars around her. Suspended in some kind of in-between.

From the center of the chaos, a voice emerged—not Iven’s. Not hers.

Something older. Deeper.

It whispered, “You weren’t supposed to look.”

Then the room collapsed.

She woke up in a field.

Tall golden grass swayed around her, warm wind brushing her cheeks. The sun was low in the sky, casting long shadows—but there were no shadows beneath her feet.

Just grass. And silence.

She stood up slowly, heart thudding like a trapped bird.

And then—

A whisper beside her ear, as if carried by the wind.

“You ran. That was smart. But you’re still inside.”

She spun around.

Iven stood there, barefoot, wearing a white coat stained at the edges. In his hand was a mirror shard. It flickered like it was trying to remember what it had reflected.

“You said this wasn’t a simulation,” Nara said, her voice sharp. “You said it was a someone. A self.”

“Yes,” he said. “And you’re a thought inside it. A rogue one.”

He held the shard out to her.

It showed her face again.

But this time—it blinked.

Not in sync with her.

“She’s dreaming you,” Iven said. “But you’re starting to think on your own. And that means…”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

Because the grass around them began to tilt.

No—not tilt. It was rotating, like the page of a book being turned.

Nara clutched the mirror shard as the sky started melting, dripping colors like ink in water.

“I don’t want to disappear,” she whispered.

“You won’t,” Iven said, wrapping a hand around hers. “But you may have to rewrite yourself.”

The world folded in half.

And everything went dark.

When the dark lifted, it didn’t lift all the way.

Nara found herself in a place that wasn’t lit, but wasn’t exactly dark either. The sky was a dull static gray, like a TV stuck between channels. The ground beneath her feet rippled like paper in water, and far off in the distance, she saw a version of her school, half-sunken and stretched at the edges like it had been remembered wrong.

Iven was gone.

But the shard was still in her hand.

She looked into it.

This time, the reflection was no longer her face. It was an eye.

Huge.

Unblinking.

Watching.

She dropped it. The shard didn’t fall—it floated, then dissolved into a fine dust that shimmered and vanished into the air.

A sound rose behind her.

Footsteps.

Not real ones. Not human. They were too even. Like audio on loop. The same four steps. Over and over.

She turned around.

It was Mia.

But not her.

This Mia’s head twitched every few seconds. Her smile was wider. Her eyes were just… too still. Like she was being played.

“Did you do the homework?” she asked.

Nara didn’t answer.

Mia stepped closer.

“Did you do the homework?”

Step.

“Did you do—”

Nara ran.

She didn’t know where she was going, only that she had to move. The sky above glitched. The sun rewound in place like a broken reel.

She sprinted toward the warped school in the distance, its windows flashing random images—her room, her mother's face, the melting mirrors.

When she burst through the front doors, it wasn’t a school anymore.

It was a hallway of doors.

Endless.

Each one labeled.

“Day 4,290”

“First Doubt”

“Mia’s Loop”

“Looked in the Mirror”

“Almost Woke Up”

She moved down the corridor, breath sharp in her throat.

Then she saw it:

“You.”

A single black door.

No knob.

Just a slit of red light spilling out from underneath.

She reached toward it—and the world shook.

A low rumble, like something huge shifting just outside the thin walls of this reality.

Then—

A voice.

Not in her ears.

In her head.

“She’s approaching the threshold. Begin termination of unstable thoughtline.”

And a second voice—softer. Closer.

“No. Let her open it. Let her see.”

The red light flared under the door, pulsing like a heartbeat.

Nara placed her hand on the surface.

It was warm.

Alive.

Breathing.

And then, with a sound like paper tearing inside her skull, the door opened.

Inside—

Was her.

Hooked up to wires.

Sleeping.

And something was whispering into her ear.

Over and over.