He snapped his index finger.

  The portrait convulsed.

  The oil smudged, stretched, reformed— a school corridor, washed in flickering fluorescence and the smell of wet wool.

  Stella walked through it, her sketchbook clutched to her chest like a shield stitched from brittle hope. Her steps were small. Careful. Almost apologetic.

  The other children didn't touch her. They parted, silently, subconsciously, as if she carried an invisible contagion. Not hatred—worse: a sickness they feared might be catching.

  Whispers braided themselves through the stale air— not loud enough to be understood, but loud enough to bruise.

  Behind her, Somebody's mouth stretched open in mockery.

  Somebody (smiling without warmth):

  "White rat."

  Stella flinched— the first visible crack in her porcelain composure.

  Stella (small, fractured):

  "Stop."

  But the whispers thickened. Oily. Inevitable.

  Somebody (gleefully, cruelly):

  "Alien eyes."

  Stella (louder, pleading):

  "Stop!"

  The portrait flickered— showing her seven-year-old self standing amidst a sea of backs turned deliberately away. The sound of sneakers squeaking against linoleum echoed like derision.

  Somebody (voice curling like smoke):

  "Witch kid."

  The words slashed through her, unseen blades parting soft flesh. Her mouth trembled open again, ragged.

  Stella (gasping, almost childish again):

  "No—please! Stop! I don't want to remember those things! I wanted to forget—!"

  Tears welled but refused to fall, suspended at the brink of collapse. (How heavy words could become when poured into a body too small to carry them.)

  The portrait mutated once more.

  Older girls blocked her path, grinning too widely—grins that split their faces like broken masks. They didn't touch her. They didn't have to.

  Their stillness was the violence.

  The oil bled again. New shapes. New cruelty.

  A boy around her age stepped forward, too casual, too smiling.

  His face was blurred in spiral like a memory even somebody didn't dare invoke.

  ? ? ?

  The sentence dug itself under her skin like barbed wire. Words heavier than fists.

  They didn't hit her. They didn't shove her.

  They erased her.

  And that was worse. She wasn't hated. She wasn't loved. She was forgotten in real time.

  One of them bumped her—'accidentally'— and her sketchbook slipped from her hands, pages scattering like dead leaves across the muddy floor.

  The paintings—her soul pinned in paper—trampled under careless boots.

  No teachers came. No adult hands reached down.

  Only Stella, on her knees, gathering the ruined remnants with trembling fingers, mud bleeding into dreams she was too young to articulate.

  The dark realm pulses softly—the mirror memories dim.

  Somebody (soft, like a surgeon humming at an autopsy):

  "You were crafted too delicately, little one."

  "A heart too crystalline, beating in a meat-world built for wolves."

  "Your soul —" (he gestures lazily, ink bleeding from his fingertips) "— is a petal shivering on a battlefield. Meant to bloom in air... instead crushed under boots marching toward survival."

  Stella (whispers, trembling):

  "Why did they hate me?"

  Somebody (chuckling, but not cruelly):

  "Hate? No. Not at first."

  "Once, long before memory, difference was death."

  "The tribe feared the stranger because the stranger carried unknown knives, unknown sicknesses. To distrust was to endure."

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  "A pale flower blooming in a field of sameness?" (he bends low, voice lowering to a conspiratorial hush) "It was not evil that plucked you, child. It was a reflex. Ancient. Mindless."

  He stands again, taller now, his silhouette flickering like static caught between dimensions.

  Somebody:

  "Greed, hatred, exclusion... they were not born as sins."

  "They were tools. Gifts from nature to keep flesh alive a few seconds longer under a blood-weeping sun."

  "But time outlived their usefulness."

  "Now, the hands still twitch, the teeth still bare—" (his grin widens, unnervingly empty) "—but there are no more predators in the tall grass."

  "Only children... hurting children... hurting children."

  The mirror shows Stella's own hands—so tiny—clutching broken sketches, while laughter curdles around her like smoke.

  Somebody (almost mournfully):

  "You were never hated, Stella."

  "You were feared."

  "Because you glowed in colors they had not yet learned to name."

  ? ? ?

  The mirrors throb. The dark realm blinks like a dying constellation. The new portraits liquefy into a single, enormous frame—an ocean of oil stretched taut.

  Stella walks forward. Her bare feet leave no echo now. Behind her, Somebody steps with the precision of a funeral bell.

  Somebody (low, almost reverent):

  "Ah, yes. This chapter."

  "The flesh revolts. The spirit folds."

  "Tell me, little flower—do you remember when your body first betrayed you?"

  The canvas ahead forms: A hospital bed. An IV spiderwebbing into a frail arm. A girl too small for her age, too still for the world.

  Somebody (his voice is silk cutting through bone):

  "Loneliness... Loneliness is not sadness."

  "It was engineered long before sorrow was named."

  "Back when to stand alone was to die alone—when separation from the herd meant becoming a feast for the fanged, the winged, the unseen."

  "It is not a weakness. It is an ancient alarm screaming in your marrow."

  "You felt it even in your solitude, didn't you?"

  "The tremor. The ache to belong."

  "But you—you—chose to starve that instinct."

  "Because you understood what even the old ones could not."

  "That connection is survival. But survival is no longer enough."

  The canvas shows: Stella refusing visitors. Hospital room door closed. Birthday cake left untouched. The sterile garden she retreats into.

  Stella (for the first time, speaking without being asked—soft, shaking, splintering):

  "I chose to vanish."

  "Because the world I touched wasn't mine."

  "Every handshake felt like theft. Every smile like a lie. Every embrace like an attempted erasure of the small, strange thing that was me."

  She lifts a trembling hand toward the canvas. Oil drips from her fingertips like mourning blood.

  Stella (voice sharpening—not louder, but heavier, dense with a child's terrible clarity):

  "The body is a trap."

  "A house I was assigned to live in without consent."

  "They told me to love it. To adorn it. To be grateful."

  "But this skin... these bones... they scream their own mortality with every heartbeat."

  "I wear my death stitched into me."

  "Every glance, every breath, every sick cough was the body reminding me: You will end."

  "And the soul they told me I had...?"

  she laughs once, a sound like a cracked bell

  "If it exists, it's caged behind blood and bruise."

  The canvas fractured— split by unseen hands— each shard blossoming into mirrors once more, their surfaces feverishly alive, feverishly watching.

  Beneath Stella, the floor convulsed in slow tidal breaths— no longer marble, no longer void— but a glass ocean of embryonic stars, struggling to be born.

  Above, the sky rotted into a velvet blackness so pure it devoured memory. A cathedral ceiling for the funeral of childhood.

  Stella looked up.

  Her gaze found Somebody—still draped in the skin of mockery, still wearing the face of nothingness shaped into a grin.

  A sliver of her innocence—fractured now, brittle at the edges—clung to her bones like the last warmth of a dying ember.

  Her eyes—sharper, narrower—shone with the haunted lucidity of someone who had been told a secret too old for language.

  Somebody tilted his crowned nothingness toward her, voice curling out like frost from a grave.

  Somebody (casual, as if discussing the weather): "Let us return to the open wound, shall we?"

  "Why do you dream, Stella?"

  Silence.

  A pause so cavernous even the void itself seemed to kneel— forgotten, unspooling, abandoned by the ticking hands of whatever god had dared to wind it.

  Time bent. The stars below convulsed once—twitched like dying neurons.

  And then— a breath, so small it cracked the silence open—

  ? ? ?

  Stella's lips parted.

  "I dream..."

  The syllables fracture like thin ice over the abyss—each shard prismatic with unbelonging

  "...because reality is a farcical pantomime staged for an audience of marionettes who forgot their strings were cut."

  These nocturnal visions are mere epileptic elegies from a thalamus too stubborn to surrender its charade. I observe them as a pathologist might study his own autopsy—with clinical fascination for the cadavers of meaning left twitching on the slab.

  Her irises become event horizons, swallowing the light of comprehension whole

  "Occasionally, I dissect the firmament with my fingernails—not to verify its emptiness, but to admire the craftsmanship of my own delusion."

  The heart's arrhythmic dirge is just an orphaned echo ricocheting through derelict cathedrals of bone. These so-called "reconstructed selves"? Just a chorus of phantoms performing Greek tragedy with my decaying synapses as their stage. Dawn never breaks—the illusion merely resets its trapdoors and bloodied props.

  A supernova of dead neurons blooms behind her enamel—beautiful and meaningless in equal measure

  "Yet herein lies the sublime jest..."

  The void upon which I project? It projects reciprocally through me—its indifferent fingers moving my brush, its infinite yawn exhaling through my lungs. We are co-conspirators in this grand epistemological vivisection—the dissector and dissected becoming one.

  Her final smile mirrors the event horizon of a dying quasar—radiating perfect, terrible understanding

  "...and the denouement is always, always the same exquisite silence."

  When her final syllable evaporated, it was not sound that lingered— but gravity itself, thickening, lowering, suffocating.

  Her words sank deeper than any blade— deeper than marrow— down into the myth-blood of the world itself.

  The mirrors around her trembled— not with fear, but with recognition. The void blinked slowly, awed by its own reflection.

  Somebody watched her with the slow stillness of ancient ruins watching their last worshipper leave.

  Somebody (whispering, velvet and brutal): "Very well."

  He clapped— once.

  A sound like the snapping of an umbilical cord between dream and dreamer.

  And then—

  Oblivion uncoiled.

  It rose from the mirrored stars, from the air itself— a beast too vast to be named— and it swallowed her.

  ? ? ?

  Stella's eyes snapped open.

  She lay blinking in a world too bright, too clean, too new.

  Breathing. Living. But no longer whole.

  Something vital had been amputated from her— not blood, not flesh— but a filament of wonder that had once tethered her to herself.

  She sat up, slow as thawing ice, the sterile light sewing shadows under her eyes.

  A thought fluttered against the cracked cage of her ribs:

  Had she awakened? Or merely dreamed another layer tighter?

  And now, like every broken wonderer before her— Stella asks herself, in the secret places words dare not touch:

  "Is my reality fabricated?"