The shears felt cold against her paper-thin skin, the steel a jarring, alien weight compared to the weightlessness spreading through her limbs. Amelia tried to drop the blades, to let them clatter against the floor, but her muscles were no longer hers; they were a series of inked pulleys and charcoal levers operated by the girl in the mirror.
Sarah’s reflection didn't mimic Amelia’s terror. Instead, the girl in the glass stood tall, her red-stained fingers intertwined with Amelia's as they both gripped the shears. The bedroom behind them continued to dissolve, the walls peeling back in long, fibrous strips to reveal the infinite, shrieking white void that Sarah had escaped. The desk, the bed, and the childhood photos were being unmade, drawn back into the nib of an unseen pen.
"Don't fight the edit, Amelia," Sarah’s voice resonated, vibrating behind Amelia’s teeth. "A character is only a vessel for a purpose. You’ve served yours. You gave me the blood; now, I’ll give you the peace of a finished page."
The tip of the shears nipped the skin at the hollow of Amelia’s throat. A bead of red appeared—not the messy, blooming crimson of human blood, but a perfect, circular dot of ink, precise and intentional. Amelia’s vision began to flicker, the world around her losing its color, fading into the stark, high-contrast monochrome of a finished storyboard. She could feel the ink-twin in her shadow pulling tighter, its barbed silhouette anchoring her to the floor as she became nothing more than a sketch on the carpet.
Sarah leaned closer to the surface of the mirror, her face pressing against the glass until it seemed to bulge outward. The boundary between the reflection and the reality snapped with the sound of a closing book.
"The story is finally moving," Sarah whispered, her breath smelling of cedar and wet pulp.
With a sickening, rhythmic *snip*, the shears began to move, but they didn't cut flesh. They cut the air itself, slicing through the very dimension Amelia occupied. As the blades met, the girl felt a sudden, terrifying lightness. She looked down and saw her legs had vanished, replaced by a clean, white margin.
The perspective shifted. Amelia was no longer looking into the mirror; she was looking up from the floor, her field of vision trapped in a two-dimensional plane. Above her, a pair of boots stepped onto the paper she had become. Sarah—solid, warm, and breathing—looked down at the drawing of the girl with the shears at her throat.
Sarah reached down and picked up the red marker. With a flourish, she scrawled two words across Amelia’s frozen, illustrated face.
*THE END.*
Then, Sarah turned, walked to the bedroom door, and stepped out into a world she was ready to rewrite, leaving the cap off the marker to let the rest of the world bleed out.