A Door That Was Never Meant to Open
Aarav couldn't move.
The echo—his other self—was advancing, step by step, its expression eerily blank. But its eyes… they were wrong. Too deep, too knowing. As if it had seen things he hadn't.
"Get back!" Aarav shouted, but his voice echoed strangely, as if the tunnel itself was swallowing it.
The girl yanked him backward. "Stop talking. Every word you speak here feeds it!"
Aarav clamped his mouth shut.
The echo smirked.
"Ah… so you're learning." Its voice was distorted, like a thousand overlapping whispers. "But not fast enough."
Then, it ran at them.
The girl reacted instantly. She swung the metal rod—fast, precise—but the echo didn't dodge. Instead, it shattered like glass, breaking into thousands of flickering fragments—
And then those fragments moved.
They crawled toward Aarav, reforming, twisting into something else.
"Run!" The girl didn't wait for him to react—she shoved him forward, sprinting into the dark tunnel.
Aarav ran.
Behind them, the pieces of the echo were laughing.
---
The tunnel twisted, endless and shifting. The further they ran, the stranger it became. The walls were no longer solid stone; they pulsed, as if something alive was just beneath the surface.
Then, without warning—
The girl stopped.
Aarav nearly slammed into her. "What the hell—?"
She pointed.
A door stood in front of them.
It was wrong.
Carved from something too dark to be wood. Too still to be stone.
And the handle… it was a hand.
Fingers curled tightly, as if gripping something unseen.
Aarav swallowed hard. "That… wasn't here before."
"No," the girl whispered. "It wasn't."
Aarav stared at it.
A door. Deep underground. In a tunnel that was never meant to exist.
And yet…
It felt familiar.
As if he had seen it before.
His fingers twitched. He had the overwhelming urge to touch it.
"Aarav."
He froze.
That voice.
Not the girl's.
Not the echo's.
Something else.
Something from behind the door.
The girl gritted her teeth. "We should go back."
Aarav wasn't sure they could.
Because behind them…
The tunnel was gone.
Only blackness remained.
The door creaked.
The hand-shaped handle uncurled—
And reached for him.