Another week had gone by since Aria started to plan to kill her niece and staff.

She had sent Lenha to live at Patriks place. She told them that she didn’t want to see either of them, and they were to stay away from her until she called. The lack of both of their presence in the mansion worried the staff that was still working there.

It was Lenha and Patrik that were the main people that calmed Aria down when she went into a rage, and now neither of them were there.

Aria had contacted her underworld associates and discussed disposing of her niece and staff. They were at first confused as to why she wanted to do this, but any intention in talking her down from this course of action quickly evaporated, once money was brought into the discussion. These people that Aria knew were all too willing to do this for her if enough money was offered, and she was willing to dig into her pockets to give them a fortune to make it happen.

It would take her a month to get her finance in order to pay for all these hits. So in the meantime, she slowly started to set things up for her plan. Aria was sending them all away one by one. She would find an excuse to fly into a rage and send one of the servants away. Though, it wasn't completely an act from Aria.

The staff on her estate were really starting to annoy her. It wasn't just her perception of their betrayal that angered her, it was their attitude towards her. The staff would give her clear looks of fear every time they were in her presence. Their fear pleased Aria. It gave her a sense of control over them. She was used to it, but that fear was slowly changing.

The looks of fear changed to that of pity.

“Why would they dare pity me? Do they know something I don't? Someone as beautiful as me doesn't need their pity.” She thought to herself at the time.

Within a week, the staff began to dwindle. Some of the servants that were still working there could see the writing on the wall, and left of their own volition, thinking that Aria was intending on firing everyone. They didn’t know they were the target of Arias' scorn, and within a few more weeks she would pay to have them killed. It didn’t matter if she sent them away or they left themselves, Aria still intended to have her associates remove them all the same.

By now there was only a skeleton crew left working at Arias mansion, but after another week went by until she was the only one left in her mansion. Within two weeks she had sent everyone away.

She was left alone to fend for herself. Forced to do some of the things that she once made the staff do. This only irritated her more, but she convinced herself to put up with it for another two weeks. Once next month rolls over, she would have her finances in order to allow her to pay for the hitmen and hire new staff.

“Just two more weeks. Then I can go back to fully admiring myself.” She would tell herself.

The strange atmosphere that existed in Aria's room, due to the presence of the mirror, started to spread to the whole of the mansion. Something about the strange feeling in the air was unwelcoming, an unspoken warning for people to stay away. The shadows felt ever so darker and sinister on the estate during this time.

A normal person would have noticed that something was going on, but not Aria. She was too busy admiring herself to see the strange peculiarities that were going on around her.

Aria was currently admiring herself in the giant bedroom mirror like she always did. It was later in the evening.

Aria: “Ahh, so beautiful,” she said to her reflection.

Today Aria was wearing a beautiful pure white A-line dress. She felt that it matched beautifully with her blond hair and blue eyes.

Now that her staff was gone, she was spending close to eight hours a day admiring herself. She would have continued to admire herself for several more hours, but her revelry was disturbed by the sound of someone knocking on her bedroom door and a familiar voice.

Lenha: “Aunt Aria, are you ok?” she called out from behind Aria bedroom door.

The piercing voice of Aria’s niece brought her to attention and greatly angered her. Aria didn’t let Lenha call her “aunt”, so the fact her niece did that was infuriating for her. And. Aria never called for her. Lenah wasn't supposed to be here.

Aria: “You fucking bitch! Who said you could come here!” she screamed out.

Aria quickly moved towards the door to her room and opened it, preparing to smack Lenah for daring to call her “aunt”. But, once the door swung open, there was no one there. It left Aria confused for a few seconds, but then she heard movement down the dark hallway.

“That bitch dares run from me, after daring to call me ‘aunt’. Forget the hitmen, I'll kill her myself!” She angrily thought to herself.

Aria quickly grabbed some scissors with a sharp tip from her room and ran down the hallway towards where she thinks Lenah ran off to. It was late and the mansion was dimly lit. Aria was running through her mansion in the dark with a pair of scissors like madwomen.

Aria: “Lenah! Where the fuck are you!” She screamed out.

Lenah didn’t respond, and Aria couldn’t hear her footsteps anymore. She rapidly looked around for her niece and even ran down to the main floor of her mansion searching for her, but no matter where Aira looked, she couldn't find Lenah.

While looking around, she noticed a light coming from one of the hallways. Aria had a twisted smile on her face, as she thought she had finally found her niece.

She carefully approached the edge of the hallway, so as to not inform Lenah of Aria's presence. She saw a small mirror on a nearby wall. Not wanting to stick her head around the corner, and risking alerting Lenah of her presence, she positioned herself in a way to use the mirror to look down the hallway.

Looking into the mirror, she expected to see her niece, but that’s not what she saw. Instead, there was a grotesque humanoid creature standing in the hallway. The details were hard to make out in the low light of the mansion. The shape of the creature still looked somewhat human, but it looks to have bulbous growths all over its body.

Upon seeing that, Aria let out a silent gasp.

“W-what is that thing.” She thought to herself in silence, afraid that if she said anything that the creature would find her.

The creature didn’t move or make a sound. It just stood there, like it was waiting for Aria to run around the corner.

Not wanting to confront the creature, she slowly backed away while being as quiet as possible. She didn’t want to alert the creature that she had detected its presence.

Aria continued to slowly back away from the hallway the creature was in, but she wasn't watching carefully where she was going and bumped into a small table. It made a loud sound from its legs scraping the floor. A vase sitting on the table began to wobble from the sudden movement, and before Aria could catch it, it fell off the table. A loud sound of pot being smashed echoed in the empty mansion.

Assuming that the sound alerted the monster to her, Aria ran.

She ran up the stairs to the second floor of her mansion. Fear was palpable in her every movement and breath. She didn’t know what that creature was or how it even got in here. It was a creature unlike anything she had ever seen. She wondered if it was one of those legendary ghouls she heard about

Aria was too scared to look behind her as she ran, but there was another mirror at the end of the hallway she was running down, and she made the poor mistake of looking into it. She briefly saw the reflection of the creature running after her from behind. In a panic, she threw the scissor behind her without looking, unsure if it hit the monsters.

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She managed to make it to her room and locked the door. Aria then ran towards the wired phone on the desk in her room. With shaking hands, she dialed the number to contact the police.

The dial tone rang out twice before she heard someone pick it up.

Emergency Dispatcher: “Hello, what is your emergency?” The voice said calmly.

Aria: “Help me! There’s a monster in my home! I think it’s a ghoul!” She shouted into the phone.

Emergency Dispatcher: “A ghoul?” the dispatcher said in confusion, before returning back to his calm monotone cadence. “Please calm down ma’am, where are you currently located?

Aria: “I'm on 13 Saint Street! Please send someone to save me!” She continued to yell.

Emergency Dispatcher: “There are people on the way right now, Ma’am. If you can get to a safe location, or barkade yourself somewhere, please do so. Officers will arrive in ten to twenty minutes. Now, can you please tell me—” the dispatcher was cut off by Arias screaming.

Aria: “That is not quick enough! I need help now, i’m—” She stopped mid speech, as she thought she heard something outside her bedroom door.

Scared for her own safety, she put the phone down and did what the dispatcher suggested. She grabbed chairs and what furniture she could move, and put them in front of the door. All while she faintly heard the voice of the person on the phone call out to her.

Emergency Dispatcher: “Hello? Ma’am are you still there?” He called out faintly from the phone on Arias desk.

Aria ignored the voice on the phone, and continued to pile everything she could in front of the door. Making it near impossible to open the door from the outside, but the barricade she constructed wasn't big enough in Aria’s mind.

“It is not enough. Ghouls are supposed to be impossible strong. It will smash through this in no time.” She thought while panicking.

Aria continued to move everything in front of the door from: her bed, dressers, desks, hangers, and sofas. But despite doing that, it didn’t make her feel safe. For the first time since receiving that mirror, she finally felt the uneasiness in the air. It was potentially making her slightly more irrational and fearful than she would have been.

Eventually everything that wasn't mounted to the wall was now in front of her bedroom door.

“It’s still not enough!” She screamed in her head.

She looked around, but there was nothing she could grab to put in front of the door. There was the giant mirror and a few large cabinets, but they were all too heavy for her to move by herself. She then remembered the bathroom beside her room and ran into there, looking for anything else to put in front of her bedroom door. Once inside the bathroom, she looked around erratically before freezing in place.

The monster she had been running from was in there. It was standing right in front of Aria a few feet away, just staring at her with its empty white eyes. She was frozen in fear and didn’t move a muscle. Afraid that if she made the slightest movement, it would attack her.

Now that she was so close to it, she could make out more details than the brief moments she saw the creature's reflection. It stood like a human and was thin and lanky with bright pink skin. The arms of the creature were slightly longer than that of a human, with long spindling fingers that were slightly bulbous at the joints and ended with chipped nails. It was bald and hairless with the lips pulled back to reveal its gum. The shape of the creature's body was uneven in places with disgusting looking growths spread randomly across its skin.

It was a hideous and grotesque thing to her. A monster that was as ugly as Aria was beautiful. Except, she wasn't so sure it was a monster as she examined the creature.

She was starting to come to a slow realization that this might not be so much a monster, as much as a person. Possibly a mutant. Despite its ugly features, there wasn't anything that was particularly inhuman about it. It was even wearing clothing. It was wearing a white A-line dress. It was almost comical that such an ugly thing was wearing such a nice dress.

But, even if it was a mutated human, Aria was still fearful for her safety. So, with bated breath she slowly took a step backwards to see how this “person” reacted. As she did, the “person” in front of her also took a step backwards. Aria was confused, but continued to repeat what she did and slowly back away from the “person”. Step by step, she backed away and the thing in front of her did the same.

It then dawned on her that she was being copied. The thing in front of her was copying her movements perfectly. She then did a few exaggerated movements and waved at the thing in front of her, and it did the same.

She started to re-examined what she was looking at, and then realized that it was the mirror mounted over the sink in the bathroom she was actually staring at. She was staring at a reflection, her reflection.

“What?” she thought to herself confusingly.

She then looked down at her hands, and finally realized how deformed they had become. A horrifying realization washed over her very being.

She ran over to the giant mirror in her room and gazed at her reflection. It was not the deformed creature she saw in her bathroom mirror. The reflection was her beautiful normal self in that flawless white A-line dress.

Still confused, she ran back to the bathroom mirror and saw the grotesque person from before. She ran back and forth between the mirrors before taking a chair and throwing it at the bathroom mirror. Sharp shards of the mirror were flung everywhere. She bent down and picked up a large shard before running back to the large mirror.

She then stood in front of the giant mirror holding a piece of a broken mirror up to her face. She would turn her head back and forth between the mirrors examining herself. The giant mirror reflected a beautiful blond hair woman, while the broken mirror piece reflected a deformed human.

Aria was beginning to lose track of what was real. She didn’t want what she was seeing in the broken mirror to be true, but when she looked down at her own body it resembled more of the grotesque humans than her beautiful self.

Aria: “No no no no. This can’t be happening,” she said horrified.

She continued to look between her reflections, until she noticed something off about her reflection in the giant mirror. It was not moving. Her reflection was frozen in place like a painting on a wall. Another thing that was odd, the reflection of the background was also wrong.

It didn’t look like Aria's bedroom was reflected in the mirror. Instead, the background in the mirror looked like the inside of a giant creature's month with hooked teeth pointing inward like a lamprey.

Aria: “W-what’s happening?”

There was no response to any of the queries.

Her reflection moved independent of Aria, and started to reach towards her. In the blink of the eye, the glass of the mirror disappeared. It was replaced by a gaping hole with teeth and something that looked like Aria in it. The clone of Aria slowly stepped out of what was once a mirror, now turned to the inside of a creature's mouth.

Aria dropped the mirror in her hand and stumbled backwards in absolute terror.

Aria: “What are you!” she screamed out.

Aria’s Reflection?: “So, beautiful.” It said with a soft voice while slowly approaching the real Aria.

Aria: “Get away from me,” she yelled.

Aria backed herself into the corner of the room. She desperately looked for a way to get out of here, but she had barricaded the only way in or out of her room. She was trapped.

Aria’s Reflection?: “Come…Come be beautiful with us.”

Aria: “No, please no!” She begged with tears rolling down her now ugly face.

Aria’s Reflection?: “Isn't this what you wanted?”

Aria: “Huh?”

Aria’s Reflection?: “To fully be appreciated for your beauty. And, you are so beautiful to us. The rage, the cruelty, your vanity, it’s all so beautiful to us. And, ever so delicious. Afterall, isn't beauty and hunger both the same.”

Aria: “No… “ she pleaded out, unsure of what her clone was saying.

The reflection of Aria's face warped and twisted, as if it was made of clay, into an impossible and disturbing smile. In one quick action, the reflection grabbed Aria by her arm and began to drag her towards the giant mirror, now turned mouth.

Aria: “Noooo! Please no!” She screamed.

She struggled to free herself from the twisted reflection of herself. It held unnatural strength and she couldn’t free herself from its grasp.

Aria: “Please Lenah, if you are there. Please, save me!” She yelled out to her niece, hoping that she was there and could help.

She begged anybody to save her, but her pleading went unanswered.

Once they were both in front of the giant mirror, with one quick motion, her reflection tossed the deformed Aria into the mirror. As she entered into the mirror, gravity shifted around her and she began to fall down.

The last thing Aria saw was her twisted reflection smiling at her, before she fell into the endless maw of a beast. A beast that was as ravenous as Aria was once vain.

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Beauty is an amorphous concept that changes with a person's perspective. It is undefined and can be redefined, and even overlap with other concepts.

As such, If someone saw this play out from start to finish they might think that the mirror warped her appearance and consumed her, but that was hardly the reality. The mirror only reveals what she wanted, and what she truly was. Her own ugly desires for beauty was what twisted her into a grotesque mockery of the concept. At least, from Aria's perspective it was grotesque, but her vanity stopped her from seeing it that way until it was too late. It was her obsessive desire for beauty that became a monster and devoured her whole, only leaving memories and pictures of her behind.

Afterall, mirrors don’t eat people.