The house breathes differently now.
It no longer creaks with hunger. No longer dreams in flames. No longer tries to swallow the people inside it.
Irlenne walks barefoot through the east corridor, where the sun is beginning to return in quiet streaks of gold across the dust-soft floor. Her fingers trail the edges of the new wallpaper — delicate moths embroidered into velvet blue, soft as secrets.
A house once designed to contain her has become something else.
A house that remembers.
A house that chooses to let her go.
---
Theda is already up.
She's in the garden again, planting rosemary with bare hands and a frown that means peace. The new girl — still unnamed — is beside her, kneeling in the dirt with the kind of reverence Irlenne hasn't seen in years.
They speak in soft tones.
Like survivors.
Like sisters.
Irlenne doesn't interrupt.
She walks the perimeter instead. Testing the frame of this new life.
The manor has changed.
Where once there were locked doors and sharpened corners, now there are cushions on the windowsills. Books left open. Candles that smell like warmth and not wax. Stolen laughter in the library, and paint-stained hands in the kitchen.
Lucien has even carved words into the threshold of the main hall:
> "You are not too much. You were just held in too small a place."
Irlenne stood there the first time she saw it, unable to move.
Then she cried.
Then she stayed.
---
Lucien finds her in the gallery.
He's been restoring the last of the mirrors — cautiously, lovingly. This one is different.
Tall.
Narrow.
Framed in thorns carved from obsidian and old guilt.
The east wing mirror.
The one they once covered with silk.
The one Mara once spoke through, even after she died.
Irlenne watches him work in silence.
The glass doesn't speak. Not anymore.
But it watches.
Lucien glances at her, then back to the surface. "Do you think it's empty?"
Irlenne shakes her head. "No. Just... quiet."
He touches the edge of the frame, then smiles faintly. "Maybe that's what forgiveness sounds like."
Irlenne doesn't answer.
Because maybe forgiveness isn't something you hear.
Maybe it's something you live with.
Every day.
---
That night, the girl with no name dreams of fireflies.
She sees a house made of mirrors. Each one shows a version of her she doesn't yet understand — brave, cruel, gentle, furious. She sees Mara in one, winking. Sees Theda weeping in another. Sees Irlenne holding her own hand.
In the final mirror, the girl sees herself — just herself — and doesn't look away.
When she wakes, she says:
> "I think I want to be called Alira."
Theda asks what it means.
Alira shrugs. "Don't know. But it sounds like someone who survives."
Irlenne smiles.
> "Then it suits you."
---
Later, in the east wing...
Alira finds the mirror uncovered.
It's not cracked. Not bleeding.
Just still.
She steps toward it. Her reflection does not waver.
But a soft whisper curls through the air like breath:
> "We remember you."
Alira doesn't run.
She simply nods.
And the mirror — for the first time in years — says nothing back.
Just holds her.
Steady.
Unbroken.