The tension in the living room slowly shrank like mist caught in a passing wind, leaving behind a far heavier silence. Wildan still stood with ragged breaths, his chest heaving as he fought to drag in air that somehow felt thinner and drier by the second.

Seeing his family simply standing there and gazing at him with wounded expressions, Wildan’s anger slowly dissolved, replaced by a familiar, torturous wave of guilt.

"I'm sorry," Wildan whispered at last. His voice was raw, nearly spent. "Brother didn't mean to yell, Rian. Brother's just... my head hurts so much."

Rian didn't answer. The boy only lowered his head, fidgeting with his fingers in the corner of the room. His mother watched him with a gentle sigh—a sigh that strangely produced no sound or breath of air at all.

"Drink this first, Le. Calm your heart," his mother said, gesturing toward the glass of warm water she had set down earlier on the cement table near the sofa.

Wildan nodded slowly, stepping over to the table and reaching for the glass. The warmth of the water inside offered a slight comfort to his trembling hands. After taking half a sip, Wildan glanced back at Rian. His little brother remained motionless, looking terribly small and fragile beneath the shadow of the antique cabinet.

"Rian, do you... want a drink?" Wildan offered, trying to mend the situation and extending the glass toward his brother.

Rian looked up. Silently, he stepped toward Wildan. His movements were so smooth, as though the boy weren't walking across the tiles at all, but gliding across a layer of air. Rian reached out his right hand to take the glass from Wildan's grasp.

The second their fingertips brushed against one another, a profoundly bizarre shock struck Wildan's consciousness.

COLD.

It wasn't ordinary cold. The chill crawling from Rian's skin felt utterly extreme, as cold as a block of ice freshly hauled from the deepest freezer. It was a dead, rigid frost that instantly shot up through the veins of Wildan's wrist, piercing straight into his heart and causing him to jerk his hand away on instinct.

CLATTER!

The glass slipped from his fingers, striking the cement floor and shattering into shards. The warm water inside instantly pooled, splashing across the tiles, which strangely felt warm to the touch.

"W-what is wrong with your hands, Rian?!" Wildan shrieked, trembling violently from shock. He stared down at his own palm where he had just touched his brother, the aching, muscle-freezing numbness still lingering there. "Why is your skin... that cold? Are you sick? Are you freezing?"

Rian didn't look at the broken glass. He merely stared down at his own palms with a blank, hollow expression. "Rian isn't cold, Big Brother. Rian can't feel the cold anymore."

"What are you talking about?" Wildan backed away a step, his heart hammering wildly out of control.

"Wildan, stop it. Don't frighten your little brother," his father interrupted from behind the sofa. His father stepped closer, followed by his mother gliding in from the kitchen.

The three of them now stood in a row right in the center of the living room, directly beneath the pale orange glow bleeding through the gaps in the ceiling. Wildan, shaking all over, slowly backed away until his spine slammed against the wooden wall near the television.

Hanging on that wall was a large square mirror with a teak frame cracked at the corner. It was the only mirror in their living room.

Reflexively, Wildan’s eyes darted toward the mirror reflection at his side.

Instantly, every joint in Wildan's body seemed to go slack. The blood in his veins stopped flowing, freezing solid at the sight laid out before his eyes.

Inside the mirror, his own reflection was painfully clear—a skinny young man in a white undershot singlet, dripping with sweat, wearing a look of blatant terror.

Yet, the reflections of the three people standing right before him...

The reflections of his father, mother, and Rian looked blurry.

They didn't look like solid human beings within that glass pane. Their silhouettes appeared detached, as though coated by a shimmering, vibrating mist. And the most horrifying thing of all: inside that mirror, Wildan could see with absolute clarity that his father's, mother's, and brother's feet were not touching the cement floor.

There was a vacant gap of several inches beneath the tips of their shoes. They were hovering, suspended motionless in mid-air, entirely divorced from the gravity of the earth.

Wildan blew his eyes wide, his breath catching in his throat until a choked, muffled moan escaped his lips. "Y-you guys... your feet..."

He ripped his gaze away from the mirror and stared directly at their real feet before him. Visually, to his direct eyes, they appeared to be standing on the tiles. But the moment he glanced back into the mirror, that empty gap remained. The illusion fractured right before his eyes.

"Why, Wildan? What do you see in that mirror?" his mother asked.

Her lips wore a warm smile—a very warm smile—yet her eyes radiated a sorrow so profound that tears of blood began to well in the corners of her pale eyelids. Her voice no longer sounded as though it originated from the room around them, but instead echoed deep inside Wildan's skull, heavy and layered.

"Who are you people?!" Wildan screamed hysterically, tears finally breaking free from the grip of overwhelming terror. "You're not my dad! You're not my mom! Rian isn't like this! Why is this house acting like this?! What is happening?!"

His father stepped forward an inch. In the mirror, his father's blurry reflection shifted right along with him, still hovering without touching the ground. "We are your family, Wildan. We are the people who love you most in this world."

"Liar! My dad never talks to me like that! My mom never looks at me like that!" Wildan gripped his own head, feeling as though it were about to split open. The acrid smell of burning suddenly mutated into the reek of roasting flesh, intensely suffocating, turning his stomach with nausea. "Get out! Let me out of this house!"

"There is no way home for you outside, Brother," Rian whispered. The voice of the twelve-year-old boy suddenly sounded chillingly mature, heavy with heartbreaking resignation. "If Big Brother goes outside now, Big Brother will join us. We don't want Big Brother to join us. You have to stay right here... in a safe place."

"Safe from what?!" Wildan roared, his body slumping down onto the cement floor, which now felt scorching hot—strikingly contrary to the ice-cold aura radiating from the three figures before him.

"Safe from the fire, Le," his mother answered softly.

The sentence slipped out effortlessly, shattering the silence with a crushing, unbearable truth, even while Wildan's terrified logic still refused to piece together this horrific puzzle. The three of them slowly stepped forward, closing the distance, encircling Wildan as he sat limply on the floor, watching him with a gaze steeped in agonizing protection that felt utterly chilling.