Dear...readers

I woke up in my bed.

That should have been the end of it. Library nightmares, creepy circles, freeloading shadow—chalk it all up to stress and questionable snacking. But when I stood up, sunlight didn’t come through the window. There wasn’t even a window.

My room had four walls, yes, but they were blank stone, faintly glowing like paper held against a flame. And there on the desk sat the diary. Open. Pen ready. Waiting.

Naturally, I screamed a little. Not full-throttle horror-movie scream, but the kind of low, frustrated groan you make when you realize your phone charger’s at 1% and across the room.

The diary’s last written words stared at me:

“Doors do not stay open forever.”

I hadn’t written that. At least, I didn’t remember writing it. But my handwriting was there, looping and smug.

I touched the page. The ink rippled. And in the ripple, I didn’t see my reflection. I saw him.

My shadow.

It smirked. “Finally.”

Something snapped inside me. A memory I hadn’t owned until now: every step, every joke, every scribble in this book… not mine. His.

I wasn’t the narrator of these entries.I was the one trapped inside them.

The library, the cult, the murals—those weren’t places. They were scaffolding, stage props. My shadow built them for me to wander in while it wore my skin. And every diary entry was another nail in the coffin, another line of ink sealing me tighter into the story.

I was never writing. I was being written.

The diary flipped its pages without my hands. Entries scrolled backward—Day 9, Day 8, Day 3, Day 1—until they stopped at the very beginning. The handwriting blurred, and in the empty white space, fresh lines carved themselves in neat black strokes:

“Curiosity is currency. You paid. Welcome.”

My knees buckled. My laugh cracked like glass. Because now I understood: the diary was never a record. It was the ritual. The circle wasn’t chalk on the library floor—it was ink on these pages.

And I had already stepped inside.

A scraping sound drew my gaze upward. A mirror formed across the stone wall, wide and gleaming. I saw my face in it. Or rather, I saw him. The version of me with that smirk, standing free, stretching my limbs like they belonged to him—because they did.

He tapped the glass. From the other side. “You hesitated. I didn’t. So I win.”

I slammed the diary shut. Pages fluttered like wings. But the stone walls pulsed, amused.

A new line scrawled itself across the cover, clear and final:

“Every reader is a door.”

My heart froze. Because in that moment, I felt it—the presence beyond me. Beyond the page. Beyond the wall. A weight, watching, holding this book in their hands.

Not me. You.

The mirror smiled wider, impossibly wide, and for the first time my shadow spoke directly past me:

“Do you see?”

The stone walls flickered like paper burning. My body blurred into letters, sentences, diary lines, until I felt myself thinning into the page. I wasn’t a person anymore—I was words. Words in a story someone else was reading.

And now the diary isn’t mine. It’s yours.

Because the ritual isn’t finished until it’s read. My shadow doesn’t just need a vessel—it needs an audience. Curiosity is the door, and by looking through these words, you’ve already stepped across the threshold.

So let me sign off properly.

---

Diary Entry #12

Dear… readers,

1. I was never writing to myself. I was writing to you.

2. The library doesn’t exist outside these pages. It is these pages.

3. My shadow has me. It wants you next.

4. If you’re still reading, the circle has already opened.

— Not Me

P.S. Do you want to see?

---

And with that, the diary closes.

But the circle does not.