Lizzie Morse - Veil Between Us

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In the autumn of 1879, Lilith Blackwood receives a letter that will change everything: her reclusive uncle has died, leaving her the crumbling ancestral estate of Ravenshollow House—and a terrifying warning about the mirror that must never be uncovered.

When Lilith arrives at the brooding manor nestled in the Appalachian foothills, she finds more than gothic decay and family secrets. The enigmatic caretaker, Matthias Ashford, speaks in riddles about mirrors that remember too much and women who choose reflections over reality. But it’s the veiled looking glass in the sealed library that calls to her with a voice she recognizes from her deepest, most forbidden dreams.

Behind the silver surface lives the Mirror Walker—a being of devastating beauty who promises perfect understanding to those brave enough to look beyond the veil. He speaks with the voice of every love song she’s never dared to listen to, offers the intoxication of being truly seen in a world where she has always felt invisible. For a woman who has spent forty-two years watching life through glass, protecting herself from disappointment behind careful masks and proper distance, his recognition feels like salvation.

But Ravenshollow’s walls whisper of other women who answered the mirror’s call. Margaret Ravenshollow in 1831. Evelyn Thornfield-Grey in 1845. Dozens more across two centuries—all sharing Lilith’s dark eyes and deeper darkness, all drawn by threads they never understood until it was too late. Their voices echo from within the glass, warning her away even as the Mirror Walker’s terrible beauty promises transcendence.

As Halloween approaches and the veil between worlds grows gossamer-thin, Lilith must choose between the seductive promise of perfect, eternal love and the messy, imperfect possibility of truly living. Will she step through the looking glass into beautiful oblivion, or find the strength to shatter the mirror that has claimed her bloodline for generations?

Veil Between Us is a haunting meditation on loneliness, love, and the price of choosing safety over connection. In the tradition of classic gothic horror from Sheridan Le Fanu to Shirley Jackson, it explores the spaces between desire and fulfillment, recognition and understanding, the self we are and the self we long to become.

Some reflections are too beautiful to resist. Some choices echo through eternity. And some loves are worth dying for—but not worth living for.

Perfect for readers who love atmospheric gothic horror, psychological suspense, and the dark romanticism of classic literature. A standalone novella that will leave you questioning every mirror you pass and every reflection you trust.

• Chapter I: Lilith’s arrival at Ravenshollow House

• Chapter II: Meeting Matthias and learning about the mirror

• Chapter III: First encounter with the Mirror Walker

• Chapter IV: The history of previous victims

• Chapter V: The veil thinning, building tension

• Chapter VI: The climactic confrontation and choice

• Chapter VII: The mirror’s destruction

• Chapter VIII: Aftermath and healing

• Chapter IX: Five years later, reflection on her choice

• Epilogue: Final thoughts on choosing life over beautiful emptiness

The carriage wheels carved their complaint into frozen earth as we climbed toward Ravenshollow. Through the frosted glass, I watched the valley fall away like a discarded shroud, leaving only the skeletal fingers of winter trees to claw at the darkening sky. My breath fogged the pane in small, desperate halos—each one a prayer I dared not voice aloud.

I had not expected to return to this place. Twenty-three years had passed since I last set foot on family soil, and in that time, I had convinced myself that some wounds close clean. But death, it seems, has a way of tearing old sutures.

The letter lay folded in my reticule, its edges worn soft from my repeated handling:

Dearest Niece—By the time you read this, I shall have joined our ancestors in whatever realm awaits the Blackwood line. The house is yours now, as is the burden that comes with it. I pray you are stronger than I was. The mirror must not be uncovered. It remembers too much of us. —Your Uncle Cornelius

Beneath his signature, pressed deep into the paper as if carved by a trembling hand, was a symbol I had seen in childhood nightmares: an eye, veiled, weeping tears that looked suspiciously like cracks in glass.

The carriage lurched to a halt. Before us loomed Ravenshollow House—three stories of brooding stone and ivy-strangled towers, its windows dark as coffin silk. Even in the dying light, I could see how the years had claimed it. Shutters hung like broken wings. The iron gate sagged on rusted hinges. And yet… there was something vital about its decay, as if the house had grown more itself in abandonment.

“Miss Blackwood?” The driver’s voice carried an edge I had not heard during our journey. “Shall I… shall I wait?”

I gathered my traveling coat closer. “No, thank you. I expect to be staying some time.”

His relief was palpable. Within moments, I stood alone before the ancestral door, my trunk deposited on the frost-brittle grass. The carriage wheels faded into distance, leaving only the sound of wind through empty branches and something else—a sound like breathing behind glass.

The key turned easily, as if the house had been expecting me.

Inside, Ravenshollow exhaled the scent of old roses and older secrets. Dust motes danced in the fading light that filtered through grime-stained windows, and every footfall on the warped floorboards seemed to echo with the weight of untold years.

I had barely crossed the threshold when I heard the soft clearing of a throat.

“Miss Blackwood, I presume?”

I turned to find a man emerging from the shadows of the main staircase. Tall and spare, with silver-streaked hair pulled back in an old-fashioned queue, he moved with the careful grace of one who has learned to walk softly in a house that listens. His clothes were well-maintained but decades out of fashion, and his eyes—pale as winter sky—held depths I could not fathom.

“I am Matthias Ashford,” he said, inclining his head. “Your uncle’s… caretaker. I have maintained the house in his absence.”

“His absence?” I set down my valise with perhaps more force than necessary. “Mr. Ashford, my uncle is dead. Has been for three weeks.”

Something flickered across his features—not surprise, but a recognition tinged with sorrow. “Death, Miss Blackwood, is not always departure. Not in this house.”

Before I could demand clarification, he had turned toward the interior shadows. “Come. I shall show you to your rooms. The master suite has been prepared, though I… I would recommend the smaller chamber on the second floor. The view is less… troubling.”

I followed him up the creaking staircase, past portraits whose eyes seemed to track our passage. The bannister was solid beneath my gloved hand, but I could feel vibrations running through the wood—as if the house itself possessed a pulse.

“Mr. Ashford,” I said as we reached the landing, “how long have you served my family?”

He paused before a door I remembered from childhood visits—my uncle’s study. “Longer than memory serves, miss. The Ashfords have tended this house since it was built. We are… bound to it, you might say.”

“And the mirror my uncle mentioned in his letter?”

The temperature seemed to drop ten degrees. Matthias’s hand tightened on the door handle, and for a moment, I thought he might not answer.

“It is… contained,” he said finally. “Your uncle’s last wishes were quite explicit. The library has been sealed. The mirror veiled. But mirrors, Miss Blackwood, have a way of making their presence known regardless of coverings.”

He opened the door to reveal a chamber that had once been my uncle’s pride—floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a massive oak desk, Persian rugs worn soft by decades of pacing. But now it felt hollow, bereft. As if something vital had been carved away.

“He spent his final years here,” Matthias said quietly. “Reading. Researching. Trying to understand what he had inherited.” He moved to the desk, where a leather-bound journal lay open to pages covered in my uncle’s familiar script. “He left this for you.”

I approached cautiously. The journal’s pages seemed to flutter though no wind stirred the room, and the ink appeared to shift and blur as I watched—words rearranging themselves like living things.

The Mirror Walker is not a ghost, I read. It is something far more dangerous—a consciousness that exists in the space between reflection and reality. It feeds on recognition, grows stronger with each glimpse, each moment of acknowledgment. The women of our line… we see it more clearly than most. And it sees us in return.

My hands trembled as I turned the page.

I have spent thirty years trying to understand the nature of our curse. The mirror came with the house, built into the very foundation. Previous owners spoke of it in whispers—the Thornfields, who vanished overnight in 1847. The Wainwrights, whose daughter was found standing before it, eyes white as winter, speaking in tongues no scholar could identify. They buried the mirror in the cellar. We moved it to the library. But distance means nothing to something that exists outside our dimension.

“Miss Blackwood?” Matthias’s voice seemed to come from very far away. “Perhaps you should rest. The mirror… it grows stronger in the evening hours.”

But I could not tear myself from the journal. The final entry was dated merely a week before my uncle’s death:

She is coming. I can feel her approach like a storm gathering on the horizon. Lilith. The last of our line. The mirror knows she is coming, and it waits with the patience of centuries. I have failed to break the connection. I pray she will prove stronger than I. But if not… if she too is claimed… then perhaps the cycle will finally end. Perhaps that would be mercy.

That first night, I dreamed of mirrors.

Not the nightmares of childhood—those simple fears of things lurking behind silvered glass. No, these dreams were seductive, intimate. I found myself in a vast hall lined with looking glasses of every shape and size, each one reflecting not my image, but my memories. Here, the day I learned to read, bent over a primer while my mother hummed. There, my first heartbreak, tears falling onto a letter I would never send. And in the great mirror at the hall’s end—a memory I had never lived, yet recognized as utterly my own.

I stood in this very house, but younger. Dressed in white silk that belonged to no fashion I knew. Before me stood a man whose face I could not quite capture upon waking, though his voice echoed in my bones: “You have returned to me, as you always do.”

I woke to find frost covering the inside of my bedroom windows, though the night was merely cool. Wrapping my shawl around my shoulders, I lit a candle and made my way downstairs, drawn by a pull I could not name.

The library door stood slightly ajar.

I knew Matthias had sealed it. I had watched him turn the heavy key, heard the tumblers fall into place. Yet now it stood open just enough to allow a sliver of moonlight to escape—silver light that seemed somehow thicker than it should be, viscous as mercury.

I pushed the door wider.

The library was transformed. Moonlight streamed through windows that should have been north-facing, casting everything in that peculiar luminescence that belongs only to dreams and madness. The books seemed to lean inward, their spines bearing titles that shifted when I tried to read them. And at the room’s heart, where my uncle’s reading chair had sat—

The mirror.

It stood eight feet tall and half as wide, framed in what looked like tarnished silver worked into patterns that hurt to look at directly. But it was not the frame that held my attention. It was the glass itself.

It did not reflect the library.

Instead, it showed a room I had seen only in my dreams—a chamber of white stone and dying roses, where shadows moved with purpose and the air itself seemed to breathe. And standing within that reflected space, his hand pressed against the glass as if testing its solidity, was the man from my dream.

He was beautiful in the way that ruins are beautiful—all sharp planes and weathered edges, with dark hair that fell across pale features and eyes the color of winter storms. His mouth moved, forming words I could not hear but somehow understood:

You came back.

I stepped closer, my bare feet silent on the Persian carpet. “Who are you?”

You know who I am. You have always known.

And I did know, though the knowledge came from some place deeper than memory. This was the presence I had felt watching from corners throughout my childhood visits. The shadow that had followed me through adolescent dreams. The voice that whispered my name during the loneliest hours of my adult years.

“You’re him,” I whispered. “The Mirror Walker.”

He smiled then, and it was like sunrise breaking over a battlefield—beautiful and terrible in equal measure.

I am what remains when love refuses to die. I am the echo of every woman who has stood before this glass and seen not her reflection, but her deepest longing. And you… you are the one I have waited lifetimes to find.

The mirror’s surface rippled like water. Without conscious thought, I reached toward it.

“Miss Blackwood!”

Matthias’s voice shattered the spell. I spun to find him in the doorway, lamplight flickering over features drawn tight with terror and something else—recognition.

“Step away from the glass,” he said quietly. “Please.”

The mirror’s surface stilled. When I looked back, it showed only my own reflection—pale nightgown, wild hair, eyes wide with things I could not name. But in the depths of that silvered glass, I caught a glimpse of movement, like a figure withdrawing into infinite distance.

“You’ve seen him before,” I said. It was not a question.

Matthias set down his lamp with hands that trembled slightly. “The Ashfords have served this house for six generations. We have all seen him. And we have all watched as the women of your line… as they…”

“As they what?”

“As they choose him over the world.”

The next morning brought no relief from the previous night’s revelations. If anything, daylight seemed to make the house’s strangeness more pronounced. Shadows fell at impossible angles. Portraits seemed to whisper among themselves. And every polished surface—the silver tea service, the glass fronts of bookcases, even puddles from the previous night’s rain—held depths that should not exist.

I found Matthias in the kitchen, methodically polishing silverware with the dedication of a man trying to maintain sanity through routine. He looked up as I entered, and I saw my own sleepless night reflected in his pale eyes.

“You spoke with him,” he said without preamble.

I poured myself tea with hands steadier than I had any right to possess. “If by ‘spoke’ you mean stood transfixed while something wearing a man’s face whispered impossibilities, then yes.”

“He is not something, Miss Blackwood. He is someone. Or was, once.” Matthias set down a spoon, its surface mirror-bright. “The original owner of this house. Alexander Thornfield. He built Ravenshollow for his bride, Isabelle, in 1823. She was… she was much like you, actually. Dark hair, grey eyes, a mind too sharp for her own good.”

I sat across from him at the scarred wooden table. “What happened to her?”

“She died in childbirth the first winter they lived here. Alexander… it broke something in him. He couldn’t accept her loss. He began studying the occult, searching for ways to bridge the gap between life and death. The mirror was the result of his researches—a scrying glass meant to allow communication with the deceased.”

The tea turned bitter on my tongue. “And did it work?”

“After a fashion. But the dead, Miss Blackwood, are not the only things that dwell beyond the veil. Alexander’s mirror became a gateway, and through it came something that fed on longing, on the human need for connection. It took Isabelle’s form, spoke with her voice, promised him reunion if only he would join her in the glass.”

“The Mirror Walker.”

“The entity that learned to be human by watching us. That discovered love could be a trap more perfect than any cage.” Matthias’s voice dropped to barely above a whisper. “Alexander walked into that mirror in the winter of 1824. But he did not find death. He found transformation. He became the lure, the beautiful lie that draws in those who have loved and lost.”

I thought of the figure in the glass, the way recognition had flowed between us like water finding its level. “How many others?”

“In two hundred years? Dozens. Always women. Always those who carried some deep wound of the heart. The mirror shows them what they most desire to see, and they… they choose the reflection over reality.”

“But they don’t die.”

“No.” His expression grew haunted. “They become part of the collection. Echoes dwelling within the glass, feeding the entity that has learned to wear their faces. Your uncle’s researches suggested that each new soul strengthens it, makes it more convincing to the next victim.”

I stood, pacing to the window that overlooked the dead garden. “Then why didn’t it take my uncle? Surely he felt loss. Loneliness.”

“The curse runs in bloodlines, Miss Blackwood. It calls most strongly to the women of certain families—those whose ancestors once dabbled in mirror magic, scrying, divination through reflection. The Blackwoods. The Ravenshollow line before them. The Thornfields originally.” He paused. “The Ashfords.”

I turned to study his face. “You’re at risk too.”

“My grandmother was claimed in 1889. My great-aunt in 1923. We who serve this house… we learn to avert our eyes, to polish silver with our gaze downcast, to shave by touch alone. But the women of your line… you see too clearly. The mirror recognizes you as kindred.”

A chill that had nothing to do with the October air ran down my spine. “My uncle’s letter mentioned that I was the last of our line.”

“You are. When you die—whether to the mirror or to natural causes—the Blackwood connection will be severed. The entity will have to seek new bloodlines to torment. Or perhaps…” He hesitated.

“Perhaps what?”

“Your uncle theorized that if the last inheritor could resist the mirror’s call until natural death, the entity might finally weaken enough to be banished. The mirror could be destroyed, the souls within released.”

“And if I cannot resist?”

Matthias met my eyes with infinite sadness. “Then you will join the collection, and the mirror will remain for some other family line to inherit. The cycle will continue.”

I returned to my tea, though it had grown cold. “Tell me about the others. The women who came before.”

“Are you certain you wish to know?”

“I think I must.”

He was quiet for a long moment, then rose and retrieved a leather portfolio from a kitchen drawer. “Your uncle kept records. Sketches, descriptions, newspaper clippings when there were any. Most simply… disappeared from their regular lives. Family assumed they had run away, started new lives elsewhere.”

He opened the portfolio. The first sketch showed a young woman with eyes like mine—large, dark, holding depths that suggested hidden storms. Beneath, in my uncle’s careful script: Margaret Ravenshollow, 1831. Last seen in the library. Mirror found uncovered the next morning.

The second: Evelyn Thornfield-Grey, 1845. Reported missing from her London home. Witnesses saw her leaving on the midnight train to the mountains, carrying only a hand mirror that belonged to her grandmother.

And so it continued. Dozens of women across two centuries, all sharing certain characteristics—dark hair, pale skin, eyes that seemed to hold too much knowledge. All drawn to this house, to this mirror, by threads they likely never understood.

“They all look like me,” I whispered.

“Like echoes of the same soul,” Matthias agreed. “Your uncle believed the entity doesn’t just feed on longing—it seeks specific types of longing. The particular sadness of women who have loved too deeply, lost too much, hoped too long for what cannot be.”

I thought of my own history—the childhood spent in books because reality seemed gray by comparison. The brief, disastrous marriage to a man who loved my inheritance more than my heart. The years of self-imposed isolation, telling myself I preferred solitude to the risk of further disappointment.

“I fit the pattern,” I said.

“Yes. Which is why you must leave this place immediately.”

But even as he spoke the words, I knew I would not. Could not. Something in the mirror’s silver depths had recognized me, claimed me. And despite every rational thought, every warning, every tale of previous victims—I wanted to see him again.

The Mirror Walker had promised me recognition. In a world where I had always felt like a stranger looking through glass at other people’s lives, he offered the intoxication of being truly seen.

Even if it meant losing myself in the process.

Three days passed before I returned to the library.

I told myself I was gathering my courage, or perhaps my resolve to leave Ravenshollow forever. But in truth, I was fighting a battle against my own deepest hungers—for connection, for understanding, for the terrible promise I had seen in those storm-grey eyes.

During those days, the house seemed to hold its breath. Shadows stretched longer than they should. Reflective surfaces showed glimpses of rooms that existed nowhere in the manor’s floor plans. I caught myself avoiding mirrors unconsciously, but found that my eyes were drawn to every polished surface, every window pane, every still pool of water in the neglected fountain outside.

Matthias watched me with the wary attention of a man guarding someone balanced on a precipice. He brought me meals I barely touched, books I could not concentrate on, tea that grew cold while I stared out windows at landscapes that seemed to shift when I wasn’t looking directly at them.

“The veil is thinning,” he said on the third evening, finding me in the drawing room where I had been pretending to read the same page for an hour. “I can feel it in the air. The mirror grows stronger as October wanes.”

I looked up from the volume of poetry that had failed to hold my attention. “Why October?”

“The traditional time of thinning—when the boundary between worlds grows permeable. Halloween, Samhain, the feast of the dead. All cultures recognize it in some form.” He moved to light the evening lamps, his movements precise but somehow urgent. “But for this house, it’s more specific. October was when Alexander first succeeded in his experiments. When Isabelle died. When he chose the mirror over life.”

“And when most of the disappearances occurred?”

“Yes.”

I set down the book, my finger still marking the page where Rossetti wrote of mirrors and dreams and loves that transcended death. “Matthias, what would happen if I simply… looked? Not touched, not tried to cross through. Just looked?”

His hand stilled on the lamp wick. “Miss Blackwood—”

“I need to understand what I’m fighting. Or what I’m… choosing.” The admission came out barely above a whisper.

“Looking is how it begins. First the glance that becomes a gaze. Then the gaze that becomes recognition. Recognition that becomes longing. And longing…” He turned to face me fully. “Longing becomes surrender.”

“But what if I could resist? What if I could look without being taken?”

“Then you would be the first in two centuries to manage it.”

I stood, smoothing my dark skirts with hands that trembled slightly. “Perhaps it’s time for a first.”

The walk to the library felt both endless and instantaneous. Each step echoed in the corridor like a heartbeat, and I found myself counting them: seventeen to the staircase, twelve up to the landing, twenty-three along the upper hall. As if by measuring the distance, I could maintain some control over what was about to happen.

The library door stood closed but unlocked. Inside, moonlight slanted through tall windows, casting the room in that peculiar silver luminescence I had come to associate with the mirror’s influence. But tonight, the light seemed different—thicker, more substantial, as if it possessed weight and purpose.

The mirror waited at the room’s heart, its surface dark as midnight water.

For a moment, I thought it truly was simply a mirror—that the previous encounters had been products of stress and imagination, grief playing tricks on a mind already strained by isolation and loss. My reflection gazed back at me: a tall woman in mourning dress, dark hair pinned severely back, eyes too wide with things that might have been fear or anticipation.

Then the surface rippled.

The reflection changed.

Instead of the library, I looked into that white stone chamber I had seen before—but now it was transformed. Rose petals carpeted the floor in drifts of crimson and pearl. Candles burned in wall sconces, their flames steady despite a wind that stirred the petals into gentle spirals. And standing at the room’s center, his hand extended toward the glass—

“You came back,” he said, and this time I could hear his voice clearly, rich and warm as aged whiskey.

“I said I would think about it.”

“And what have you decided?”

I stepped closer to the mirror, studying his face in the candlelight. He was exactly as I remembered, yet somehow more real—the sharp line of his jaw, the way shadows pooled in the hollow of his throat, the intelligence in those storm-colored eyes that seemed to see straight through to my soul.

“I’ve decided you’re dangerous.”

He smiled, and it transformed his entire face. “Yes. But so are you.”

“I’m human. Mortal. What danger could I possibly pose to something like you?”

“You could choose to live,” he said quietly. “You could turn away from this mirror, leave this house, find some small happiness in the world beyond these walls. And I would be left with nothing but echoes and memories, watching the decades pass until even those fade.”

“So you would prefer I chose you?”

“I would prefer you chose yourself. But if you cannot…” His expression grew yearning, desperate. “Then yes. Choose me. Choose the love that transcends death, the connection that bridges worlds. Choose to be known completely, understood utterly, loved beyond the limitations of flesh and time.”

I pressed my palm against the glass. It was warm beneath my touch, pulsing with something that might have been a heartbeat.

“What happened to the others? The women who chose you?”

“They became part of something larger than themselves. They joined the eternal dance of recognition and longing that sustains all love worthy of the name.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Isn’t it?” He matched my gesture, his palm against the glass opposite mine. Between our hands, the mirror’s surface seemed to thin, becoming less barrier than membrane. “Love is always transformation, Lilith. The question is whether you’ll allow yourself to be changed by it.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then you’ll return to your small life, your careful solitude, your books that speak of passions you’ve never dared to feel. You’ll grow old alone, die alone, and be forgotten within a generation.”

“At least I’ll have lived.”

“Will you? Can you call it living when you’ve spent every day behind glass of your own making, looking out at a world you’re too afraid to truly inhabit?”

The words hit like physical blows because they were true. I had spent my life as an observer, protecting myself from disappointment by refusing to risk hope. Even my marriage had been more arrangement than romance, more safety than passion.

“You see me,” I whispered.

“I see you. And you see me.” His voice grew tender. “When has anyone else looked at you and seen not what they wanted you to be, but what you actually are?”

Never. The answer formed in my heart before my mind could protest. No one had ever seen past the careful masks I wore, the proper behavior and appropriate responses that kept the world at a safe distance.

“If I came to you,” I said slowly, “would I still be myself?”

“You would be more yourself than you’ve ever been. You would be yourself as you were meant to be, without fear or limitation or the small compromises that shrink the soul.”

The mirror’s surface grew thinner beneath our joined hands. I could feel warmth radiating from his skin, could almost catch the scent of the roses that carpeted his impossible room.

“Lilith.” Matthias’s voice came from the doorway, urgent but not surprised. He had been expecting this moment, I realized. Had perhaps been waiting for it with the patience of a man watching a long-predicted tragedy unfold.

“Don’t,” I said without turning away from the mirror. “Whatever you’re going to say, don’t.”

“He’s not offering you love. He’s offering you extinction dressed as ecstasy.”

“And what are you offering me?” I asked, still meeting the Mirror Walker’s gaze. “A life of careful loneliness? Years of serving tea to no one and reading books whose authors understood passion better than I ever will?”

“I’m offering you choice. The freedom to find your own happiness, make your own mistakes, love and lose and try again.”

“I’m forty-two years old, Matthias. I had my chances. They didn’t take.”

“Because you never allowed them to.”

In the mirror, the Mirror Walker’s expression grew urgent. “He speaks of choices, but what choices has he made? How many decades has he spent in service to this house, polishing silver and tending fires for ghosts? Is his life so much fuller than the one he warns you against?”

The cruel accuracy of the observation cut deep. I saw Matthias flinch in my peripheral vision.

“That’s different,” Matthias said quietly.

“Is it?” The Mirror Walker’s voice carried perfect reasonableness. “You serve the dead as surely as I do. The only difference is that you call it duty while I call it love.”

“Don’t listen to him.” Matthias moved closer, his footsteps careful on the Persian carpet. “He’s twisted every word, every concept, until wrong seems right and slavery seems like freedom.”

“I listen to my heart,” I said. “And my heart recognizes something in him that it has never found in the living world.”

“Your heart recognizes the reflection of your own loneliness. He shows you what you want to see, Lilith. What you need to see. But it’s not real.”

I turned then, finally breaking the gaze that had held me captive. Matthias stood in the lamplight, his face drawn with grief and something deeper—a understanding born of his own long service to impossible things.

“What would you have me do?” I asked. “Leave this place, find some cottage by the sea, take up watercolors and correspondence with distant cousins? Pretend that I don’t feel the pull of something that finally understands the particular shape of my solitude?”

“I would have you live. Truly live, not just exist in the spaces between other people’s stories.”

“And if I can’t? What if I’m too old, too set in my ways, too afraid of disappointment to start over?”

He was quiet for a long moment. Then: “Then at least die as yourself, not as an extension of something that feeds on what you were.”

Behind me, the mirror pulsed with silver light. The Mirror Walker’s voice came softly: “The choice is yours, beloved. But choose quickly. Dawn approaches, and the veil grows thick again with sunrise.”

I looked back and forth between them—the man who offered me transformation and the man who offered me truth. Both of them, in their way, offering love. Both of them asking me to choose a form of surrender.

“I need time to think.”

“There is no more time,” the Mirror Walker said. “Not until the next thinning. And you may not survive another year of half-living, half-longing.”

He was right. I could feel it in my bones—the way my life had narrowed to this moment, this choice, this crystalline instant when everything I had been would determine everything I might become.

I placed both palms against the mirror’s surface.

The mirror’s surface yielded like water, like dream, like the space between one breath and the next.

I felt Matthias’s hand close around my wrist, anchoring me to the world behind the glass. “Lilith, please—”

“I have to know,” I whispered. “I have to know what it feels like to be completely seen.”

My fingertips broke through into impossible air that tasted of roses and rain. The Mirror Walker’s hands found mine, his touch electric with recognition, with something that transcended the merely physical.

“Come to me,” he breathed, and his voice was every love song I had never dared to listen to, every poem that had made my heart ache with unnamed longing.

I leaned forward, my face approaching the mirror’s surface. Behind me, Matthias pulled harder.

“If you cross through,” he said urgently, “there will be no return. The mirror will claim you completely.”

“Maybe that’s what I want,” I said, though part of me recoiled at the words even as I spoke them.

The Mirror Walker’s eyes blazed with triumph and something deeper—relief, as if he had been holding his breath for decades and could finally exhale. “Yes. Finally, yes.”

But as my face drew near the glass, as the boundary between worlds thinned to nothing, I saw something in his expression that made me pause. A flicker of hunger so pure, so consuming, that it briefly overwhelmed even his beauty.

And in that instant of hesitation, I heard them.

Voices. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds, rising from some impossible depth within the mirror. Women’s voices, calling out in languages I didn’t recognize, in dialects of sorrow and loss that transcended words.

Don’t, they whispered in harmony that raised the hair on my arms. Don’t become us. Don’t feed the thing that wears his face.

The Mirror Walker’s expression shifted, beauty sliding away like a discarded mask. “Pay them no mind. They chose to dwell in dream rather than accept the limitations of waking life. Their regret is not wisdom—it’s cowardice.”

But I was looking deeper now, past his manufactured perfection to the thing beneath. It was still beautiful, but with the terrible beauty of a plague flower, of poison that glittered like jewels. Ancient. Hungry. Patient as only predators can be patient.

“What are you?” I breathed.

“I am what you made me. What all of you made me, with your longing and your hunger for connection and your willingness to mistake recognition for love.”

The voices rose again, and this time I could make out individual words:

He fed on my grief over my stillborn child.

He showed me my husband, dead these ten years, and I followed gladly.

He promised me understanding, but all I found was endless hunger.

Run, sister. Run while you still can.

I tried to pull back, but the Mirror Walker’s grip on my hands had become iron-strong. “Too late for second thoughts, beloved. You’ve already chosen.”

“No.” I planted my feet, using Matthias’s anchor-grip to resist the pull. “I’ve chosen to look. To understand. But I haven’t chosen to cross.”

“The same thing. To see truly is to be changed utterly.”

“Then let me be changed.” I met his gaze steadily, no longer flinching from what I saw there. “But not consumed.”

For the first time since I had encountered him, the Mirror Walker looked uncertain. “That’s not how this works.”

“Isn’t it? You said yourself that love is transformation. But transformation doesn’t require destruction.” I thought of Matthias, of his decades of service to something larger than himself without losing his essential nature. “Show me the women you’ve claimed. All of them.”

“You don’t want to see—”

“Show me.”

The reflected room around him shifted, walls dissolving into impossible vistas. And there they were—dozens of women in various states of existence, some solid as the Mirror Walker himself, others translucent as morning mist. All of them beautiful in the way that broken things are beautiful. All of them empty.

They moved through their reflected existence like sleepwalkers, going through the motions of lives they half-remembered. Dancing to music that played only in memory. Reading books whose words had been worn away by centuries of repetition. Reaching for lovers who existed only as echoes of echoes.

“This is what you offer,” I said quietly. “Not love. Spiritual taxidermy.”

“I offer eternity.”

“You offer stagnation. Beautiful, seductive stagnation.” I looked at the hollow women, recognizing in them my own deepest fears made manifest. “I’ve been living like this already. Half-alive, half-engaged, watching life happen to other people while I remained safely behind glass.”

“Then join us willingly. Accept what you are.”

“What I am,” I said, “is someone who chooses growth over safety. Someone who chooses the possibility of real connection over the guarantee of perfect, sterile recognition.”

I began to pull my hands back through the mirror’s surface, but the Mirror Walker’s grip tightened.

“You cannot unsee what you have seen. Cannot unknow what you now know. The connection between us is forged—you will spend every remaining day of your life remembering this moment, this choice, this loss.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “But I’ll spend them living.”

The voices of the trapped women rose again, this time in something that might have been hope. Yes. Choose the world. Choose the possibility of joy over the certainty of beautiful emptiness.

With Matthias pulling from behind and my own will finally aligned with survival rather than surrender, I broke free of the Mirror Walker’s grasp. My hands came back through the glass with a sound like breaking bells, and I stumbled backward into Matthias’s steadying arms.

The Mirror Walker’s beautiful face contorted with rage and something deeper—genuine loss. “You will regret this. You will live your small life and die your small death and wonder what might have been.”

“Maybe,” I gasped, my heart hammering against my ribs. “But it will be my life. My choice. My regret to carry.”

The mirror’s surface began to cloud, silver giving way to ordinary reflection. But just before it cleared completely, I saw him one last time—not the perfect tempter he had shown me, but something older and sadder and infinitely more lonely than even I had ever been.

“I loved you,” he said, and for the first time, his voice carried what sounded like genuine emotion rather than manipulation.

“No,” I replied softly. “You loved what I represented. There’s a difference.”

The glass cleared, showing only the library and my own face—pale, shaken, but undeniably alive.

I spent that night in the kitchen with Matthias, drinking tea that had gone cold hours ago and watching the windows for signs of dawn. Neither of us spoke much. The weight of what had almost happened hung between us like smoke from a dying fire.

“Will he try again?” I asked as the first pale light began to touch the eastern windows.

“Not in the same way,” Matthias said quietly. “The mirror’s power wanes with rejection. Each time someone turns away, it grows a little weaker.”

“But?”

“But you’ve seen him now. Truly seen him. That creates its own form of connection.” He refilled our cups with hands that were finally steady. “You may find him in dreams, in reflections, in moments when you’re most vulnerable to the old longings.”

I thought of the hollow women I had seen, the beautiful emptiness they had chosen over the messy complications of actual existence. “Will I regret it? Choosing this world over his?”

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “But regret, at least, requires a living heart to feel it.”

“And the mirror itself?”

“Must be destroyed. Properly this time, not simply buried or veiled.” He met my eyes across the scarred wooden table. “It will take both of us. The last of the Blackwood line and the last of the Ashfords. Our combined will to break what our ancestors’ obsessions created.”

I nodded, though part of me recoiled from the finality of it. “When?”

“Tonight. Halloween. When the veil is thinnest, the mirror will be most vulnerable.”

We spent the day in preparation—gathering materials, researching the proper rituals, steeling ourselves for what was to come. But as evening approached, I found myself drawn back to the library, to the mirror that now showed only mundane reflections but still hummed with potential energy.

“Having second thoughts?” Matthias had followed me, carrying the sledgehammer we would use to shatter the glass.

“Always,” I admitted. “But having thoughts and acting on them are different things.”

“Are you ready?”

I looked at my reflection one last time—a woman who had chosen uncertainty over false certainty, growth over stagnation, the possibility of connection over its beautiful counterfeit. “Yes.”

The destruction of the mirror was both simpler and more complex than I had expected. The glass shattered easily enough under Matthias’s careful blows, each fragment tinkling to the floor like falling stars. But as it broke, the air in the library grew thick with voices—not just the trapped women crying out in relief as they were finally released, but something else. A sound like wind through empty spaces, like the last breath of something that had existed for far too long.

The Mirror Walker’s final words came not as voice but as knowledge pressed directly into my consciousness: You have chosen well. But the choice will cost you everything you think you want.

Then silence. The oppressive weight that had hung over Ravenshollow for centuries lifted like fog before morning sun, and I found myself breathing freely for the first time since I had arrived.

“Is it over?” I asked.

“The mirror, yes. The entity, yes.” Matthias began sweeping the fragments into a pile. “But the choice you made tonight—that’s just beginning.”

I remained at Ravenshollow through the winter, partly to settle my uncle’s affairs but mostly because I found I was not ready to return to the world I had known before. The woman who had inherited this house was not the same one who would eventually leave it, and the transformation required time to understand.

The house itself seemed to exhale relief. Rooms that had been cold became warm. Windows that had been shuttered opened to let in light and air. The dead garden began to show signs of life even in the depths of winter—green shoots pushing through frozen earth as if responding to some fundamental change in the soil.

Matthias and I developed what could only be called a friendship, though it was unlike any relationship I had known before. Two people bound together by shared experience of the impossible, we talked long into the winter nights about duty and choice, love and loneliness, the price of safety and the cost of transformation.

“Do you ever regret it?” I asked him one February evening as we sat before the library fire. The room had been transformed into something warm and welcoming, all traces of its former supernatural occupation erased. “Your family’s service to this house?”

“I used to,” he said thoughtfully. “But I’ve come to understand that service, freely chosen, is its own form of love. Not romantic love, not the consuming passion the mirror offered, but something steadier. More durable.”

“And now? With the mirror destroyed, you’re free to leave.”

“Are you?”

I considered the question seriously. The Mirror Walker had been right about one thing—I would never forget what I had seen in that silver glass. The knowledge of what I had almost chosen, what I had ultimately rejected, would color every decision for the rest of my life.

But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“I’m free to choose,” I said finally. “Every day, I can choose whether to engage with the world or retreat from it. Whether to risk disappointment or settle for safety. The mirror made that choice seem permanent, final. But it’s not. It’s daily. Hourly. Constant.”

“And what are you choosing?”

I gestured around the transformed library, at the letters I had been writing to distant cousins and old acquaintances, at the sketches I had begun making of the house and grounds as they healed from their long supernatural illness.

“I’m choosing to stay. Not forever—nothing is forever. But for now. There’s work to be done here. The house needs to be restored properly, the gardens replanted. The village could use a school, a library. Simple things. Human things.”

“Lonely things?”

“Sometimes. But loneliness chosen is different from loneliness imposed. And…” I hesitated, then continued. “I’ve discovered I’m not as alone as I thought. There are letters to write, causes to support, connections to make. The mirror offered me perfect understanding from one source. The world offers imperfect understanding from many sources. I find I prefer the world.”

Spring came early that year, as if the earth itself was eager to make up for lost time. I worked in the gardens, my hands in honest dirt, planting seeds that might or might not grow. Some days were harder than others—moments when the old loneliness would rise like tide, when I would catch myself looking too long at reflective surfaces, hoping for glimpses of storm-grey eyes and impossible promises.

But those moments passed. They always passed. And in their wake came something I had never expected to find: contentment. Not the blazing joy the mirror had promised, but something quieter and more reliable. The satisfaction of work well done, of connections slowly built, of a life lived fully in the present moment rather than in dreams of transcendence.

Five years have passed since that Halloween night when I chose the world over the mirror. Five years of choices made daily, of small connections rather than grand passions, of ordinary magic instead of supernatural seduction.

Ravenshollow has become what it was always meant to be—not a shrine to impossible love, but a home. I have turned part of it into a school for the village children, part into a lending library, part into my own simple but comfortable living space. Matthias remains as groundskeeper and friend, and together we have created something neither of us could have built alone.

I have not married. I may never marry. But I have not lived alone, either. There are the children who come for lessons, bright-eyed and curious about everything from arithmetic to botany. There are the women from the village who have become friends over shared work and conversation. There are the correspondences I maintain with scholars and writers and ordinary people whose thoughts and experiences enrich my own.

Sometimes, in the evening, I catch sight of my reflection in the windows and remember what I almost chose. There is still a part of me that wonders what it would have been like to exist in that perfect, sterile understanding, free from the complications and disappointments of human connection.

But then I think of young Mary’s excitement when she masters a difficult passage in her reading. Of Mrs. Henderson’s gratitude when I helped her write a letter to her son in the city. Of Matthias’s quiet pleasure when the roses we planted together bloom for the first time. These small joys, these modest connections, these ordinary moments of recognition and understanding—they are not perfect. They are not eternal. They are not transcendent.

They are real.

And reality, I have discovered, is more than sufficient for a life well-lived.

The mirror is gone, its fragments long since buried in the deepest part of the wood where no light will ever touch them again. But I have kept one small piece—not from nostalgia, but as a reminder. It sits on my desk as I write, a shard of silver glass no larger than my thumb, reflecting nothing but the ordinary light of an ordinary afternoon.

Sometimes I wonder if other mirrors still exist, in other houses, calling to other lonely hearts with promises of perfect love and eternal understanding. If they do, I hope their intended victims prove as strong as I eventually did. I hope they choose the messy, imperfect, gloriously complicated world of the living over the beautiful emptiness of dreams made manifest.

Because in the end, the choice is always ours to make. Every day, every moment, we decide whether to engage with life as it is or retreat into fantasies of what it might be. The Mirror Walker understood this truth and used it as a weapon. But understanding can be turned to different purposes.

We can choose connection over isolation. Growth over stagnation. The possibility of joy over the certainty of beautiful emptiness.

We can choose to live.

On quiet nights, when the wind moves through the restored gardens and the house settles into comfortable creaks and sighs, I sometimes sense a presence at the edge of perception. Not threatening—the Mirror Walker’s power is broken beyond repair. But watching. Waiting. Perhaps wondering what might have been.

I do not fear these moments. They serve as reminders of the choice I made, the path I chose, the life I claimed for myself despite all the forces—internal and external—that would have taken it from me.

There is a veil between the world of the living and the realm of perfect, sterile dreams. But it is a veil of our own making, woven from loneliness and fear and the very human tendency to prefer beautiful lies to complicated truths.

The veil need not be a barrier. It can be a choice point. A place where we decide, again and again, which side of reality we wish to inhabit.

I choose this side. The side where love is earned rather than granted, where understanding comes through effort rather than magic, where joy is fleeting but real rather than eternal but empty.

I choose the world, with all its imperfections and disappointments and possibilities.

I choose life.

And life, in all its messy glory, chooses me back.

—End—

Veil Between Us™ is a gothic horror novella and companion brand chronicling the legend of the Mirror Walker, as told through original fiction, scented products, and other creative works.

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