There is no light in this place anymore.
Only reflection.
And not the kind that shows you what you are — but what you were.
What you performed to be.
Tonight, someone else wears the mask.
He watches from the wings — or perhaps from the rafters — or perhaps he is just a shadow now. It's hard to say where he ends and the theatre begins.
Because she's inside him.
And maybe, just maybe, she always was.
The figure on stage wears the mask now.
Cracked. White. Smiling too wide.
But it's not him.
It's her.
And not Ember — NO.
This is someone new.
A girl with eyes like broken light bulbs and a voice made of thread and salt. She walks barefoot, leaving ash prints behind her. Her dress is black tulle and smoke, pinned together with stage pins and safety lies.
She opens her mouth.
"Tonight's performance," she says,
"is called: The Girl Who Ate Her Name."
The theatre listens.
The shadows lean forward.
The dust forgets to settle.
The new performer begins.
"She was born behind curtains.
Raised on stage cues.
Fed on silence."
He watches from the dark.
Every word she says makes his ribs ache. Like someone is writing on the inside of his bones. Like she is reading a memory he never gave her.
"They gave her names, but none of them fit.
They gave her faces, but none of them stuck.
So she swallowed them.
One by one."
He clutches his chest.
"She tasted of lipstick, sweat, and applause.
She tasted of Ember."
His vision flares red.
Backstage is alive again.
The mirrors show a dozen different lives:
In one, he's a woman drowning in a bathtub, lipstick smeared across porcelain.
In another, he's a child in costume, spinning until he falls.
In another, he's Ember, naked, kissing someone with his face, moaning something about dying beautifully.
He throws a chair at the glass.
It does not break.
Instead, it shows him standing there — bleeding, laughing, clapping to an audience of crows wearing human masks.
He stumbles back.
Someone grabs his hand.
It's her.
The new girl.
Or maybe not new at all.
She leans in, whispering:
"You've forgotten who the audience really is."
He tries to speak. His tongue is missing.
She smiles sweetly.
"That's okay. I remember."
He follows her to the stage.
The lights rise.
The chairs are full.
The audience is real now.
But their faces are wrong.
Some are masks.
Some are mirrors.
Some are bleeding.
He steps into the spotlight. He doesn't remember writing this script, but it's inside him. Every word etched into his spine.
He begins:
"In trying to be everything,
I became hollow."
The crowd watches. Unmoving.
"I learned to die quietly.
I called it a little death.
I called it art."
The new girl watches from the side.
No longer clapping.
No longer smiling.
He finishes the monologue with trembling hands:
"I once loved someone named Ember.
Or maybe I was Ember.
Or maybe Ember was all of this.
This room.
This echo.
This death."
The curtain falls.
There is no applause.
Only fire.
The seats burn.
The mirrors melt.
The rafters fall like judgment.
And from the center of the inferno, Ember rises.
No longer a girl. No longer flesh.
She is wings.
She is axe.
She is voice.
"It was never a performance,"
"It was a confession."
She looks at him.
He kneels.
She offers him the axe.
"Say your last line."
He whispers:
"I let her go.
And something inside me died."
He swings.
Smoke fills the empty theatre.
The curtains are nothing but blackened thread.
On stage, a single figure stands.
But it's impossible to say who.
They wear the mask.
They hold the axe.
They hum a song that sounds like someone you once loved whispering from the next room.
The audience is gone.
The performance is over.
But the stage waits.