The Melody Beyond the Mirror

Aiden Vale

Marble Sky Press

Prologue:

Before the Rain Fell 

                                                   “Some memories don't fade.They wait—quietly—behind closed eyes." 

There are memories that slip through your fingers no matter how tightly you hold them.

They don’t vanish all at once. 

They unravel slowly—like thread caught on a nail—until all you’re left with is the feeling of something once being there.

I was eleven when I first heard the sound of someone disappearing.

It didn’t come with a scream.

It came with silence.

Not the kind you hear at night, or during a quiet snowfall. 

No. 

It was a deeper kind of silence—the kind that hums behind your ears like a forgotten lullaby, the kind that tastes like rain before it falls.

There was a girl. 

I know that much.

A girl with hair like the ink stains in old notebooks. 

Eyes that looked like they’d seen tomorrow and decided not to tell anyone. 

She always smelled like something familiar—rain-soaked plum blossoms, maybe. 

Or dusty piano keys that hadn’t been touched in years.

But no one else remembers her.

I’ve asked. My mother tilts her head, confused. 

My homeroom teacher pulls out old class photos and points at the space where I swear she used to sit. 

There’s nothing there. 

Just a gap between me and the window.

Maybe I made her up. 

Maybe my brain, empty in all the wrong places, filled the void with fiction.

But that doesn’t explain the dreams.

I keep waking up to the sound of someone whispering my name.

Softly. 

Urgently. 

Like they’re drowning.

And always—always—it ends the same way.

With a tunnel.

A mirror.

And the rain.

I remember the mirror most of all.

It was tall, framed in warped silver, half-buried in the back of an old storage room at school. 

The first time I found it, I thought I was dreaming. 

The glass didn’t show me—it showed someplace else. 

A place that looked like our town, only… wrong. 

Tilted. 

Older. 

Or maybe newer. 

I could never quite tell.

The sky in the reflection always looked like it had just finished crying.

And there was always someone standing on the other side—her.

She never moved.

Just stood there. 

Waiting.

My name is Riku Tsukihara.

I’m sixteen now.

And I don’t know who I am.

They say I was in an accident. 

That I hit my head. 

That the memories I lost weren’t important. 

But I don’t believe them. 

Because every time I walk past a mirror, I flinch. 

Every time I hear the rain begin to fall, something in my chest tightens—like a music box trying to remember its song.

I came to this town because I thought it would be quiet.

I thought I could start over.

But the past doesn’t forget just because you do.

It waits.

In the cracks of glass.

In the names written in journals you don’t remember writing.

In the voices that echo when you close your eyes.

And maybe… just maybe…

In the girl who sits by the window.

The one who looks at me like I used to mean something.

Even if I don’t remember her name—

She remembers mine.

And that’s where it begins again.

Like it always has.

Like it always will.

Before the rain fell.

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