The world held its breath, suspended in the space between Ashara's lips and the word that wanted to fall. I moved faster than thought, my hand covering her mouth just as the final syllable began to form.
Too late.
The echo was already free, rippling outward like stones thrown in still water. But this wasn't sound—it was undoing. The trees around us shuddered, bark peeling away in spirals like shed skin, revealing wood that pulsed with veins of light. Above, stars blinked out one by one, methodical as counting, leaving holes in the night that looked wrong. Empty. Hungry.
Ashara went limp in my arms, her small body unable to contain what she'd almost unleashed. I caught her as she fell, her weight somehow heavier than it should be—as if the unspoken word had added mass to her bones.
"Inside. Now." Dorian's voice cut through my shock.
I ran, cradling our daughter while behind us the forest continued its grotesque molting. The ground beneath my feet felt thin, like ice over deep water. Something vast moved underneath, stirring at the vibration of prophecy partially spoken.
Our cabin materialized through trees that no longer looked quite real. Dorian slammed the door behind us, immediately dropping to his knees with our emergency supplies—ash from sacred fires, blood from his own palm, lunar salt we'd hoarded like treasure.
"Help me," he commanded, already drawing the first curves of a barrier rune.
I laid Ashara on our bed, checking her breathing—steady but strange, as if she inhaled more than air with each breath. Her skin felt cool, and shadows crawled along her arms like living things, pooling in the hollows of her collar bones, the curves of her small palms.
"We should run," Dorian said as he worked, each symbol precise despite his shaking hands. "Get her away from whatever's listening."
"No." The word came out harder than intended. "We keep running, we teach her to fear herself. To see her power as something to escape rather than understand."
"Aria, she nearly—"
"I know what she nearly did." I grabbed the lunar salt, adding my own symbols to his barrier—not from any book but from instinct, from the deep knowledge that came with motherhood and desperation. "But running won't stop the words from building inside her. Won't stop the prophecy from wanting completion."
Ashara stirred, one eye cracking open. But what looked back at me wasn't my daughter's usual silver gaze—it burned with glyphs, ancient writing scrolling across her iris like text across water. The prophecy was trying to finish itself through her, using her as conduit and speaker both.
Then the vision hit.
My mother stood in a place I'd never seen—a chamber of mirrors beneath mirrors, where reflections had reflections going back forever. She was younger than I'd ever known her, belly swollen with me, hands pressed against glass that showed not her image but something else. Something sleeping.
"If the word is completed," she said, and I knew she spoke to me across time, across death, across the impossible gap between then and now, "the one who sleeps beneath the Mirror will wake in flesh."
"What is it?" I heard my own voice ask, though I hadn't spoken.
"The first prophet. The one who spoke creation into being. It's been dreaming ever since, waiting for someone to speak it back awake." Her hand pressed harder against the glass, and cracks spread from her touch. "Every prophecy is just its dream-talking. Every word of power, an echo of its sleeping breath."
"How do I stop it?"
"You don't stop it, my love. You choose what form it takes when it wakes."
I gasped back to the present to find Dorian shaking me, the barrier rune complete and glowing faintly around us. But Ashara—
She was sitting up, tears streaming down her face. Not the tears of a child but something older, deeper. Like the world itself was weeping through her tiny form.
"I have to," she said, voice thick with salt and sorrow. "It hurts to hold it in. Like swallowing fire backward."
"Ashara, no—"
But she was already speaking, the word falling from her lips with the weight of mountains, the inevitability of rain:
"—yearns."
The air broke.
Not shattered—broke, like the moment between inhale and exhale when lungs remember they need to reverse. The barrier rune flared and died. Outside, I heard trees groaning as they returned to shapes they'd forgotten they preferred.
Then the stars blinked back on.
All wrong.
Constellations I'd known since childhood now spelled different stories. The Hunter's Belt curved into a question mark. The Great Bear had too many stars, outlining something that might have been a bear but might have been something else wearing a bear's approximate shape.
Through our single window, I saw it—a door opening in the sky. Not dramatic, not violent. Just a seam in the night that hadn't been there before, widening with the patience of something that had waited eons and could wait a few moments more.
Something began to descend.
Not falling—descending, with the deliberate pace of invited guests arriving precisely when expected.
"She didn't just speak a prophecy," I whispered, understanding hitting cold and certain. "She summoned it."
Ashara looked at me with eyes that belonged to my baby and something else in equal measure. "It wants to meet me," she said simply. "The first one. The dreamer. It says I sound like its mother."
Above us, through the door in the wrong-starred sky, something vast and patient continued its descent. Not toward our cabin—toward the clearing where reality had worn thin, where an infant's words had punched a hole in the wall between waking and sleeping.
And far above, in spaces between the stars that shouldn't have been there, something listened.
Something that had been waiting to be spoken into waking since the first word carved meaning from silence.
Something that now knew exactly where to find the voice that could finish what the first prophets had started.
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