Dark Side - Part 1-4 | Anna Claire Clouds -

She told herself it was stress. Touring. The pressure of the sophomore album.

Anna Claire looked at her reflection in the obsidian. This time, the reflection moved first.

The voicemail was 11 seconds of silence, then a whisper: “I’m not broken anymore. I’m split. And both halves are coming for you.”

Instead, she knelt.

She didn’t cry.

Then she found the notebook.

The label put her on “mandatory hiatus.” Her manager, a sharp woman named Delia, drove her to a remote cabin in the Smokies. “No phone,” Delia said. “No social media. Just you and the woods. Find your center.” Anna Claire Clouds - Dark Side - Part 1-4

The next morning, Anna Claire woke up in a motel room in Baton Rouge, naked in a cold bath, the word carved into her thigh with a safety pin.

“One night. Give me one night of complete control. No fighting. No hiding. And I’ll retreat for a year.”

At the bottom, carved into the bedrock, was a circle. Not drawn. Grown. As if the stone had wept the shape over centuries. In the center sat a mirror—not glass, but polished obsidian, cracked down the middle. She told herself it was stress

Not literally—but close. The Hollow surged up like black water. She watched her own hand pick up a steel water bottle. She watched her arm draw back. She heard her own voice say, “You want vulnerability, Ezra?”—but the tone was wrong. It was a growl wrapped in a giggle.

Anna Claire should have run.

The Hollow’s laugh was the sound of a piano falling down stairs. “What you’ve always wanted to do but were too good to admit.” Anna Claire looked at her reflection in the obsidian

Security footage showed a woman matching her description walking into a tattoo parlor in Knoxville. She emerged six hours later with a black serpent coiled up her right arm, its mouth open at her throat. She cut her own hair with sewing scissors in a bus station bathroom—cropped short, bleached white.