The Veil of Echoes

Chapter One: The House on Willow Lane

Glynnis hated the way the old house groaned. It wasn’t the usual creaks of settling wood, but something sharper—a sound like whispers trapped in the walls. She’d inherited the Victorian manor after her mother vanished two years ago. Disappeared, the police said. No signs of struggle, no note. Just an empty bed and a cold cup of jasmine tea on the nightstand.

The house had been her mother’s sanctuary, a relic passed down through generations of women who’d died too young or vanished too quietly. Glynnis remembered summers here as a child: the smell of gardenia sachets in linen closets, her mother humming Welsh lullabies while pruning roses in the overgrown garden. Now, the halls felt hollow, the air thick with the weight of unanswered questions.

The attic was the worst. Dust choked the air, and the single round window glared like a cataract eye. Glynnis had avoided it for months, but today, a compulsion tugged her up the spiral stairs. She found the mirror shrouded in a moth-eaten sheet, its frame carved with twisting vines and thorns. When she pulled the fabric away, her reflection startled her—not because of the smudges of dirt on her cheeks, but because the glass didn’t show the attic behind her. Instead, it revealed a forest choked in fog, skeletal trees clawing at a blood-red moon.

“Just old glass,” she muttered, though her throat tightened. Her mother’s voice teased her memory: “Mirrors are doors, cariad. Never linger too long.”

That night, the storm came.

Chapter Two: The Dream

The rain lashed the windows as Glynnis drifted to sleep. She dreamed of footsteps—her mother’s—echoing down the attic stairs. In the dream, she followed, bare feet sinking into carpet that felt like moss. The mirror awaited her, its surface rippling like water.

“Mama?”

The glass swallowed her.

She stumbled into the forest from the reflection. The air reeked of wet earth and decay. Above, the red moon pulsed. Shadows slithered at the edges of her vision, and in the distance, a woman in a white nightgown vanished behind a tree.

Mama.

Glynnis ran. Brambles tore her skin and roots snared her ankles. The forest breathed, its sighs harmonizing with the wind. She reached a clearing where the trees formed a circle, their trunks carved with symbols matching the mirror’s frame. At the center stood her mother, barefoot and translucent, her hair streaked with cobwebs.

“You shouldn’t be here,” her mother said, voice fraying like old thread.

“Where is here?”

“The Veil. Where lost things linger.” Her mother’s hand passed through Glynnis’s shoulder. Cold seared her bones. “Go back. Before it claims you too.”

A howl tore through the trees. The shadows congealed into a creature—a stag with antlers of broken mirrors, its eyes voids of starlight. It charged.

Chapter Three: The Awakening

Glynnis woke gasping, her sheets soaked in sweat. Dawn bled through the curtains. For a moment, she lay still, clinging to the dream’s remnants: her mother’s voice, the sting of brambles, the stag’s fractured gaze. Then she saw it—a maple leaf on her pillow, crimson and veined with gold.

But no maple trees grew near her house.

Chapter Four: The Search

Glynnis returned to the attic. The mirror showed only her own face now, pale and sleepless. But on the floor beneath it, a trail of red leaves led to a trunk she’d never noticed. Inside, she found her mother’s journal, its pages filled with sketches of the mirror, the stag, and a phrase repeated like a prayer: “The Veil takes, but the Veil gives back.”

October 12, 1999:

The stag came again last night. It says I must choose: stay and fade, or return and forget. How do I forget the Veil? How do I forget him?

Glynnis’s hands shook. Her father had died when she was six—car accident, they’d told her. But her mother never spoke of him. Beneath the journal lay a bundle of letters tied with twine. The first was addressed to her mother in a looping script:

Dearest Anwen,

The mirror is not a curse, but a bridge. I saw him today—your father. He’s trapped in the fog, but he remembers us. The stag says I can bring him home if I leave a memory. What could I possibly trade?

The letter was signed “Mair”—her grandmother. Glynnis’s chest tightened. Mair had drowned in the lake behind the house when Glynnis was a baby. Another “accident.”

Chapter Five: The Return

That night, Glynnis pressed her palm to the mirror. The glass turned liquid.

She stepped through.

The forest was quieter now. No howls, no whispers—just the crunch of leaves underfoot. In the clearing, her mother waited, solid and real.

“You’re stubborn,” her mother said, but smiled.

“Tell me how to bring you home.”

“The Veil demands balance. To take something back, you must leave something behind.”

The stag emerged, antlers glinting. Its voice vibrated in her ribs, not sound but sensation: “A memory. The one you cherish most.”

Glynnis clenched her fists. “What if I refuse?”

The stag tilted its head. “Then she stays. And you forget.”

Chapter Six: The Choice

Glynnis thought of her father—his laughter, the way he’d carried her on his shoulders through sunflower fields. The Veil had taken him first, she realized. Her mother had tried to follow, to bring him back, and lost herself instead.

“Take the memory,” Glynnis said. “Take the sunflowers.”

The stag bowed. Her mother’s form brightened, flesh and blood returning.

“Close your eyes, cariad,” her mother whispered.

Glynnis obeyed.

Chapter Seven: The Waking

She woke in her bed, the maple leaf gone. For a moment, despair choked her—it didn’t work—until she heard the knock downstairs.

Her mother stood in the foyer, alive, whole, and confused.

“Glynnis? Love, why are you crying? I just… I went for a walk, I think. I got lost?”

Glynnis hugged her, breathing in the scent of jasmine and damp earth. But when she glanced at the hallway mirror, she froze.

Her reflection was gone. In its place, fog curled through sunflowers, and a stag watched her with starless eyes.

Chapter Eight: The Echo

The doctors called it a miracle. Her mother remembered nothing—not the Veil, not the stag. But Glynnis found the journal in the trash, its pages blank.

At night, she hears footsteps in the attic. Sometimes, she sees a flicker of antlers in the dark.

She doesn’t look in mirrors anymore.

Chapter Nine: The Unraveling

Weeks passed. Her mother relearned her old routines—gardening, baking, humming those Welsh lullabies. But Glynnis noticed the gaps. Her mother no longer recalled the name of Glynnis’s first pet, a tabby cat called Pili. She stared blankly at sunflowers in the market.

One evening, Mrs. Evans from next door brought over a casserole. “Strange weather lately,” she remarked, eyeing the fog that never fully lifted from the garden. “And that noise at night—it sounds like an animal crying.”

But Glynnis knew it wasn’t an animal.

Chapter Ten: The Bargain Revisited

The stag came to her in a dream again. “You owe a debt,” it intoned. “The Veil requires a guardian. Your bloodline has forsaken its duty.”

“I gave you my memory,” Glynnis argued.

“And we gave you time. Now that time is up.”

When she woke, the house was silent. Her mother’s bed was empty.

On the pillow lay a sunflower petal, crisp and gold.

Chapter Eleven: The Final Crossing

Glynnis pressed her palm to the mirror. The glass yielded.

In the clearing, her mother stood beside the stag, her form already fading. “I’m sorry, cariad,” she whispered. “The Veil never lets go.”

Glynnis turned to the stag. “Take me instead.”

The creature’s antlers chimed like broken glass. “You have nothing left to trade.”

“Yes, I do.” She pointed to the mirror. “Take the Veil’s reflection. Let her go, and I’ll stay.”

The stag paused. “A clever bargain. But reflections are brittle things.”

“Do it.”

The world shattered.

Chapter Twelve: The New Keeper

Glynnis wakes in the attic. The mirror is gone. Outside, the garden blooms with sunflowers. Her mother tends them, singing softly.

But when Glynnis looks at her own hands, they flicker—translucent, then solid. The stag’s voice lingers in her mind: “Guard the threshold. The Veil is hungry.”

In the distance, a child’s laughter echoes. A girl with Glynnis’s eyes chases fireflies, her feet leaving no prints in the dew.

The house groans.

Glynnis smiles.

It was all just a dream.