The eclipse wasn't just swallowing light—it was devouring reality itself.
Wind howled in reverse, pulling leaves up from the ground and reattaching them to dead branches. The moon burned silver-black, a wound in the sky that bled darkness thick as oil. And in my arms, Ashara convulsed—not with pain but with presence, her small body trying to contain something that had never been meant for flesh.
Her eyes opened, and I saw war.
Two lights battled behind her silver irises—one warm and familiar, the pulse of my daughter's soul. The other cold, ancient, patient as stone. They twisted around each other like serpents, each trying to claim the territory of her being.
"Put her down," Dorian gasped beside me, but his voice came out wrong. He was clutching his head, teeth gritted against something I couldn't see.
Then it spoke.
Not in words—gods that old had no need for language. It spoke in memory, in the universal tongue of regret made manifest. The air itself became a carrier for everything we'd tried to forget.
Dorian screamed first. I saw it flicker across his face—the moment he'd failed to save his sister, watching her burn while he stood frozen. The memory played out in real-time, her death happening again, here, now, while he dropped to his knees and wept like the child he'd been.
The Elders fared no better. They collapsed like puppets with severed strings, each lost in private hells of choices that had carved them hollow. The High Priest clawed at his own throat, trying to unsay words that had condemned innocents in the name of order.
My turn came like drowning.
I was back in the birthing chamber, but wrong. The thing emerging from me had no face, no form—just hunger shaped into almost-human proportions. It wore Ashara's size but not her soul, and when it opened its mouth, the sound that emerged unmade the midwives, turned them to salt and shadow.
"This is what you invited," my own voice said from somewhere outside myself. "When you named her before she was. When you gave her titles she hadn't earned. You opened the door, and we've been waiting so patiently to walk through."
NO.
I slammed back to the present through sheer maternal rage. My daughter—my real daughter—still convulsed in my arms, battlefield for forces that wanted to use her as a bridge between what was and what should never be.
"You don't get to have her," I snarled at the thing trying to birth itself through eclipse and infant flesh.
I laid Ashara on the altar—not in surrender but in preparation. My hands moved without conscious thought, guided by deeper memory. My mother, dying, pressing knowledge into my young mind: "If the gods come calling, remember this. Blood is barrier when properly applied."
The silver knife was in my hand before I realized I'd drawn it. The cut across my palm came swift and deep, blood welling dark in the unnatural twilight. But instead of letting it fall random, I began to write.
Not words from any book, any teaching, any tradition. These were older—the kind of protection that existed before humans knew they needed protecting. My blood became ink, scribing symbols that hurt to create but hurt worse to leave unfinished.
A circle first, encompassing Ashara's thrashing form. Then the inner marks—one for breath, one for choice, one for the sacred selfishness of staying singular when the universe demanded you fracture.
"What are you doing?" The High Priest had found his voice, though it came out cracked and desperate.
"What mothers have always done," I replied, adding the final symbol—a simple curve that meant 'mine' in the language spoken before words were invented. "Refusing to let the world eat their children."
The thing in the eclipse felt my defiance and pressed harder. Ashara's back arched off the stone, her mouth opening in a silent scream that made reality flutter at the edges. But the blood-sigils held, glowing with heat that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with love transformed into action.
Then the world cracked.
Not the sky—that had already broken. Not the ground, though it trembled with sympathetic fractures. The crack came from inside Ashara herself, as if her tiny body were an egg and something vast was pecking its way free from within.
Light poured from the fissure—not warm, not cold, but absent. The kind of light that existed in the spaces between atoms, that filled the void between one moment and the next. It spilled upward, and where it touched the eclipse, the darkness recoiled.
"It's coming through anyway," Dorian said, having fought free of his memory-prison. His sword was in his hand, though what use steel would be against something that existed before metal was conceived, I couldn't guess.
"No," I said, pressing both palms flat against the altar, feeling my blood-sigils pulse with desperate purpose. "It's trying to come through. There's a difference."
The light from Ashara's breaking intensified, and in it, I saw the truth. This wasn't possession—it was birth. The thing in the eclipse had found a crack in reality shaped like my daughter and was trying to squeeze through, to be born into a world that had forgotten its oldest predators.
But birth required consent. Permission. A mother's acceptance of what emerged.
And I was done accepting what the universe tried to force through my child.
I leaned over Ashara, blood still dripping from my palm onto the protective sigils, and spoke directly to the thing trying to use her as a doorway:
"I am not the vessel. I am the blade that cuts gods."
The words came out with more than sound—with weight, with history, with the accumulated fury of every mother who'd been told their child belonged to prophecy instead of them. They hit the air like hammer blows, and the light pouring from Ashara flickered.
For a moment, I felt it—the thing in the eclipse—regard me with something like surprise. It had expected submission or struggle. Not this flat refusal to engage with its divinity at all.
The crack in my daughter began to seal, light retreating back into wherever such absences lived. But I knew this wasn't over.
It never was.
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