The world around me was black. Not darkness as in the absence of light—this was something deeper. A silence so dense it pressed against my skin. I was no longer standing in the palace, nor in the ruins of the torn altar.
I was in the Cradle.
The sacred ground where the gods went to find ourselves or to lose ourselves entirely.
My bare feet touched cold stone, smooth and endless. I stood in a void with no sky, no wind, no scent—only breath and memory.
Then came the voice.
"You should never have lived."
It was mine.
I turned and saw myself, pale and bruised, hair tangled like it had been the day they dragged me through the snow outside the temple gates. My younger self stared at me with eyes too old for her face.
"You were meant to die the night they cast you out," she said. "But you didn't. You clawed your way back. And now look what you've become."
I opened my mouth to speak, but another version of me stepped out of the dark.
