Lara Croft: Mind of the Explorer by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Lara-Croft-Mind-of-the-Explorer-1219884491

Lara Croft: Mind of the Explorer ANIMATION

The Mirrored House of Bly Hollow

The rain fell in ribbons over the forgotten estate of Bly Hollow, a mansion whose silhouette seemed less built than grown—its chimneys like blackened trees, its windows as blank and pitiless as eyes that had forgotten how to weep. Lara Croft arrived at dusk, her boots sinking into the mud of the overgrown drive, her flashlight slicing through the mist in narrow, trembling arcs.

It had been three years since the manor was last mentioned in any registry. A reclusive art collector, Lord Ambrose Vale, had vanished inside it, leaving behind a private museum of mirrors—antique, occult, and some said, cursed. Naturally, that was enough to entice Lara.

As she approached the entrance, the oak doors parted with a long sigh, though no one touched them.

“Charming,” Lara murmured. “I do love a house that welcomes its guests.”

Her voice echoed faintly, swallowed by the dark.

Inside, the air was perfumed with rot and lilac. Portraits watched her from the walls—Victorian aristocrats with smiles like surgical seams. Beneath their gaze, a grand staircase coiled upward, its banister carved with serpents whose glass eyes glittered in the lamplight.

A single mirror stood at the base of the stairs. It was massive, framed in tarnished silver vines that seemed to twitch when she looked away. She caught her reflection: the explorer’s braid, the clean line of her jaw, the calm confidence in her eyes. Yet something felt off. Her reflection lingered a fraction too long when she turned her head.

“Just the imagination,” Lara said under her breath. “Or something else entirely.”

She moved deeper into the house, toward the gallery where Vale’s collection was said to rest. The corridor was lined with mirrors—dozens of them—of all shapes and eras. Venetian, Gothic, baroque, cracked, burnished, blind with dust. Her flashlight beam glanced over them, each reflection shimmering slightly out of sync, like delayed ghosts.

Then one reflection smiled back.

Lara froze. She hadn’t smiled.

“Hello?” she called, her voice low, steady, yet carrying that quickened pulse of the unexpected.

The reflection tilted its head, and the glass fogged with breath. A whisper slipped through the pane, soft as silk: “Welcome home, Lara.”

She took a step back. “I think you’re mistaken. I don’t live here.”

“Oh, but you will.”

With that, the mirror cracked—not in shards, but in liquid threads. A hand emerged, pale as marble, then another. Her reflection climbed through the glass like a diver breaking water, her boots hitting the wooden floor with a mirrored thud.

The duplicate was perfect—save for her eyes. They were a shade too pale, the color of old moonlight.

Lara raised her pistol. “You’re rather forward for a first meeting.”

The other Lara smiled, elegant and chilling. “You shouldn’t point that at yourself.”

Before Lara could reply, her double vanished—like a reflection erased by darkness.

In the library, the air was thick with mildew and candle smoke. She lit one of the candelabras, and the flames seemed to crawl rather than flicker. Every polished surface carried that unsettling shimmer—the sense of something watching through layers of glass.

She found Vale’s journal on the desk, its pages warped and ink-stained.

“The mirrors do not reflect—they record. Each reflection learns, copies, grows... until the original becomes redundant.”

“I have seen my own face walk by me in the halls. It smiled, and I think it pitied me.”

A sound came from the corridor: the faint tap of heels. Her heels.

Lara set down the book, drawing her weapon again. The footsteps stopped at the door.

“Still exploring, are we?” came her own voice, muffled through the wood. “Curiosity really does make such delicious bait.”

Lara stepped silently to the door and flung it open—only to find her reflection standing there with a lantern, wearing the same smirk she used on uncooperative informants.

“This place deserves a better mistress,” the doppelganger said. “You’ve been trespassing in mirrors for years, Lara. Tombs, temples, crypts—you steal reflections of history. Perhaps it’s time one stole you.”

Lara’s reply was a bullet that shattered the glass behind her double—but the mirror Lara moved impossibly fast, ducking with a dancer’s grace. The two circled each other, candlelight refle
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