The mirror arrived just before dawn.
It was small, rectangular, its edges framed in dull metal. The guard passed it through the slot in the cell door without a word.
Elias took it carefully, almost reverently, as though it were something fragile beyond its physical form.
“Is there anything else?” the guard asked.
Elias shook his head. “No. This is enough.”
The guard lingered for a moment, curiosity gnawing at him.
“Why?” he asked finally. “Why a mirror?”
Elias did not answer immediately. He turned the mirror over in his hands, studying its surface before lifting it slowly toward his face.
“You ever forget what you look like?” Elias asked quietly.
The guard blinked. “No.”
Elias gave a faint, almost amused smile.
“I did.”
For a long time, he simply stared.
The cell was silent except for the distant hum of fluorescent lights and the occasional echo of footsteps in the corridor beyond. The world outside continued, indifferent and unchanged, while inside that narrow space, something deeply personal unfolded.
Elias examined every detail.
The sharp lines of his cheekbones. The faint scar above his eyebrow. The hollow beneath his eyes, darkened by sleepless nights.
He touched his face as he looked, as though confirming that what he saw was real.
“This is me,” he murmured.
It did not sound like a statement.
It sounded like a discovery.
He had not always been “The Hollow Man.”
There had been a time—long ago now—when he had been simply Elias.
A boy who laughed too loudly. Who ran through fields until his lungs burned. Who once believed that the world, for all its flaws, held something worth loving.
But that boy had faded, piece by piece, over the years.
Not all at once. Not in some dramatic, singular moment.
It had been quieter than that.
A disappointment here. A betrayal there. Losses that carved into him, slowly hollowing him out until something essential was gone.
Or so he had thought.
