Chapter Ten: Vanished Echoes
The library was quiet the next day. Too quiet.
Julian never showed up for class. Not in the folklore seminar. Not in the café where he'd promised to meet her. Not even a digital footprint—his phone was disconnected, his dorm room eerily spotless.
He had vanished.
Just like before.
Just like Theo.
At first, Isabelle convinced herself it was nothing. Maybe he panicked. Maybe the weight of remembering was too much. She understood that feeling—of being split between worlds, of not knowing what was real.
But by day three, panic set in.
Her dreams shifted again—more vivid, more violent.
She stood in a crumbling temple in her sleep, vines choking the pillars, wind whispering secrets in dead languages. At the center, a broken altar. And on it, a mirror.
When she looked inside…
She didn't see her own face.
She saw his.
And behind him—shadows with eyes. Watching. Waiting.
Isabelle woke gasping.
On instinct, she reached for the journal—the one her grandmother had hidden in the box under her bed. The journal of Emmeline Gray, a woman who had lived through madness and claimed to see between lives.
Flipping through the aged pages, Isabelle found a passage underlined twice:
"When the counterpart disappears, it is not loss—it is a call. A test. The Mirror Soul must seek, or be sought."
Her hands trembled.
Was Julian in danger? Or worse—being taken by the forces they didn't yet understand?
She traced his last steps. Library. Then the campus green. A place she knew well.
Under the roots of an old elm tree, half-hidden in the soil, she found a small pendant—one she had seen around Julian's neck. It was cracked.
Inside, pressed beneath the glass, a faded photo of a woman.
Herself. Or someone who looked hauntingly like her.
Belle.
The name pulsed in her memory like a heartbeat.
Isabelle clenched the pendant in her hand.
Julian hadn't left her.
He was taken.
And this time, she would not wait to be rescued.This time, she would be the one who searched.