Recap:
During a shared vision, Ansh, Vaishnavi, and Ishu enter a strange cave and open a mysterious screaming door. Upon awakening, Ansh exhibits disturbing symptoms, including a moving shadow. The group realizes they have not only seen the door—they have opened it.
Time fractured after the door opened.
Ansh felt it first—like pieces of the day slipped through cracks in his mind. One moment he'd be in class, pen in hand; the next, standing in the hallway with no memory of walking there. Minutes vanished. Hours blinked past him.
He stopped dreaming.
Instead, he drifted. And in the drift, something watched him.
Ishu was the first to notice the lapses. "You said you went home early yesterday," he told Ansh one afternoon. "But I saw you standing outside the abandoned clock tower. Just... staring. For hours."
"I don't remember that," Ansh replied, eyes hollow.
Vaishnavi's concern turned to action. She brought an old camcorder from her father's attic and left it running in Ansh's room overnight.
The footage shook her to the core.
At exactly 3:03 AM, Ansh sat up, eyes wide open. He whispered in a language the audio couldn't translate—guttural, clicking sounds that didn't seem human.
Then he stood.
And his shadow split.
It peeled away from his body like smoke, forming a second silhouette on the wall. The two shadows faced each other. Then, they merged.
When Ansh woke, he had no memory of leaving bed.
"Something's inside you," Vaishnavi whispered.
Ansh didn't deny it.
They returned to Sompur Woods that evening.
The air was heavier now. The trees leaned in, whispering in crackling leaves.
"What if it's a possession?" Ishu asked.
"Not possession," Vaishnavi said. "Integration. The door didn't let something in—it let something out."
Ansh nodded slowly. "I feel like I'm being rewritten. Like there's another version of me layered underneath. And it's... waking up."
They found a clearing where moss grew in spirals. Vaishnavi sat cross-legged and drew the same symbol that haunted Ansh—circle with jagged spokes. She began a chant, one meant to reveal what is hidden.
Ansh knelt inside the circle.
And the forest held its breath.
Shadows deepened.
The temperature plummeted.
And then he split.
Not in body—but in presence.
A second Ansh stepped out of his skin, made of smoke and storm, eyes glowing with a dull red light.
The Watcher.
It stared at them.
Vaishnavi reached into her satchel, pulling out a pendant of obsidian, engraved with runes.
"What do you want?" she asked the shade.
Its voice was layered—one part Ansh, one part thunder. "To return what was broken. To finish what began."
"What began?"
The Watcher raised its arm. The trees around them bent backward as if struck by wind.
"The cycle. The unraveling. He is a vessel. I am the memory."
Then it turned to Ansh, who stared at it in silence.
"You are the Key. And I... am the Lock."
The vision collapsed.
Ansh jolted back into his body. The clearing was still. Vaishnavi was sobbing softly. Ishu sat pale and shaking.
"You spoke in its voice," he said.
Ansh looked down at his hands.
The symbol was back.
But now it burned.
Vaishnavi took his hands. "You are being prepared for something. A convergence. That door... it wasn't a boundary. It was a mirror."
"So what now?" Ishu asked.
Ansh stood. "We go to the place where the mirror was first broken. We find the origin."
"Where?"
"I don't know yet," Ansh admitted. "But I think... I think I used to."