Moon_knight12

Once, stories were written to save us — fairytales filled with hope, love, and happy endings. But something ancient crept between the lines. A darkness that watched from behind mirrors. It didn’t want heroes. It wanted order. It wanted control.
In a kingdom once ruled by magic and tales, an unseen force rewrote the endings. The Mirror Network — a secret society buried in forgotten history — used enchanted mirrors to twist reality, control identities, and bend entire fates to their will. Every mirror placed in a royal chamber, every whisper that echoed through polished glass, was part of a long experiment: to erase the truth and build a world of obedience.
Red never believed in stories. Dressed in her iconic crimson cloak, sharp-eyed and sharper-tongued, she arrived at the royal palace to escape a past she could barely remember. But fate had other plans. The night she stepped into the ballroom was the night the prince died — murdered before midnight, with Cinderella at the center of the scandal.
As the fairytale crumbled, Red found herself caught in a puzzle far deeper than royal betrayal. Her investigation uncovered hidden corridors behind mirrors, a diary filled with erased names, and magic that made her question every version of truth she’d ever known. Cinderella’s charm, she discovered, was a facade — a product of the same curse that bound others before her.
The Mirror Network had marked Red too. But unlike the others, Red could see the cracks. Her mind fought back. Her memories flickered like a broken reel, revealing glimpses of stolen children, rewritten love stories, and a mirror that always showed someone else’s reflection.
Far beyond the castle walls, in a forgotten thorn-covered palace swallowed by sleep and silence, Aurora opened her eyes. A century had passed, though to her, it felt like moments. She remembered falling asleep, but not why. She remembered her name, but not her face. All that remained was the mirror.
It stood untouched by time. Smooth. Cold. Watching.
Aurora wandered the ruins of her life, searching for answers in shadows. The curse that once held her was no romantic spell — it was a lock. Her dreams hadn’t been dreams at all, but experiments — visions planted by the Mirror Network to overwrite who she was. Every time she resisted, they erased a little more.
But the magic faltered when Red shattered her story.
As Aurora unraveled the hidden carvings etched in her tower’s stone walls, she found a name. Red. The girl who broke the pattern. The girl who survived the Network’s web of lies. And in that name, Aurora found the first thread of her own truth.
Now, two stories — once separated by time and distance — begin to converge.
Red, hunted for what she’s uncovered, and Aurora, haunted by what she’s forgotten, must both confront the same question: who were they before the mirrors rewrote them?
The Network is collapsing. The magic they’ve guarded is fracturing. The mirrors are leaking into the world, twisting reality with every reflection. Versions of Red and Aurora — darker, crueler, broken — begin to manifest, born of manipulated memory and fear.
Red must return to the place where it all began. Aurora must enter the world she slept through. Both carry fragments of the mirror, and in those shards lies the key to destroying the Network.
But nothing comes without sacrifice. The deeper they go, the more truth they see. And the truth is dangerous.
The curse was never meant to be broken. It was meant to transform.
Only together can they unwrite the story, reclaim their identities, and face the one mirror that has never been shattered — the Mirror of Origin.
Because in this world, you don’t defeat monsters by fighting them.
You defeat them by remembering who you were before the story began.

Ash and Thorns: The Mirror Chronicles

The scroll smelled like ashes and rosewater.

Not the kind of scent a royal seal should carry, but something older—funeral flowers in a fire-lit chamber, the kind of scent that made your stomach twist before your mind even understood why.

I stood alone now in a long corridor of broken pillars. The monastery had collapsed the moment Cyran disappeared. No trace of the Masked Ones. No voice. No breath. Nothing but the wind… and the scroll in my hands.

The seal wasn't wax. It was mirror-glass, melted and reshaped into a sigil I didn't recognize—a broken clock wrapped in thorned vines, its hands frozen at twelve.

Words bled from the parchment like ink that had been waiting centuries to see light. They rearranged themselves as I read them—not in a language I knew, but in one I remembered dreaming.

*"To she who wakes when the dream dies—

You are not alone in your curse. You are one thread in a tapestry torn and rewoven by liars who pretend to be gods. The Glass Crown shattered not once, but seven times. Each time, a new curse was born. Each time, a story was written in blood and sewn into flesh."*

My hands trembled as the words unfolded.

"You are not the first to sleep. One wore slippers of truth and danced herself mad. One walked through the woods and tore her own heart from her chest to escape the wolf's reflection. One was told she was saved by love, but the kiss only trapped her deeper."

A faint coldness began to rise from the scroll like frost from breath.

"The girl of soot and embers—known to the world as Cinderella—was the first to see through the lie. She bled from her feet, not because of the glass, but because she broke it. Because she refused to let the mirror tell her who she was. And for that, the stories turned on her."

I had heard whispers in dreams. Rumors of a girl who wore beauty like armor and danced not for love, but for war. I thought she was fiction. A fairy tale told by lonely ghosts.

"The shards you hold, Aurora, are from the Mirror Crown—the same that Cinderella once shattered and fled. The same that stitched her curse into yours. This is not a prophecy. It is a warning. The Dream-Eater feeds on the belief that you must sleep, must obey, must forget. But it can be starved."

Suddenly, the parchment lit up. White fire flared along the edges, but didn't burn. Instead, it began to reveal an image—a memory, blooming from the page.

Not in blue silk. Not with glass slippers.

But in a black cloak soaked with rain, standing in a hall of broken chandeliers and corpses wearing masks. Her eyes were the color of molten stormclouds. In her hand, a single shard of mirror glowed, and behind her, Red—the girl with the hood—stood with a silver-bladed axe dripping with starlight.

"We are not stories," Cinderella said in the vision, her voice sharp like cracked porcelain. "We are what comes after."

But inside me, something had changed.

This wasn't just about me anymore. Not just about waking up.

A war of old magic. Of cursed stories passed like inheritance. Of bloodlines burned and rewritten.

And I was next in the mirror's reflection.

I turned sharply, expecting shadows or worse.

Instead, a door had appeared. Wood, warped by time. A strange symbol carved into the surface—the same thorned clock. But now, the hands had moved.

Twelve… oh-five.

I stepped forward and pushed it open.

Beyond it lay a cold forest under a violet sky, where time did not behave and stars whispered names I hadn't heard in years.

Because somewhere out there, Cinderella had left behind a trail of broken mirrors.

The Midnight Letter