The stars had returned wrong.
I noticed it first three nights after Ashara left the prophecy unfinished. Where once the Hunter's Belt stretched across the sky, now strange symbols pulsed—glyphs that resembled the old lunar rites but twisted, as if someone had tried to write sacred words with a broken hand. The constellations formed patterns that made my teeth ache to perceive, and I found myself looking away before their meaning could settle in my mind.
Ashara sat by our fire, small fingers tracing symbols in the dirt. Not playing—creating. Each glyph emerged with disturbing precision, and I recognized none of them. These weren't from any language I knew, any teaching she could have absorbed. They simply flowed from her fingertips like water finding ancient channels.
I wanted to stop her. Every maternal instinct screamed to scatter the symbols, to protect her from whatever knowledge was seeping through. But I'd learned the hard way that forbidding often taught darker lessons than allowing.
Dorian's whetstone scraped against steel in steady rhythm—his way of managing the tension that had lived in his shoulders since the world rearranged itself. "She's writing again," he said without looking up.
"I know."
"Last time she wrote, reality listened."
"I know."
What else was there to say? Our daughter had spoken three-quarters of a prophecy that rewrote the fundamental laws of existence. The fact that she'd stopped before the end didn't erase what she'd already done. The world remembered her voice now. Waited for her to finish what she'd started.
The knock came after moonrise.
Three precise raps against our cabin door. Not desperate. Not demanding. Patient, as if the visitor had all of time to wait for an answer.
Dorian's blade cleared its sheath in one smooth motion. I moved between the door and Ashara, though she hadn't even looked up from her symbols.
"Who travels at night?" I called through the wood.
"One who keeps doors," came the reply. A woman's voice, old but not elderly. Tired but not weak. "One who tends the spaces between open and closed."
I exchanged glances with Dorian. We'd heard of door-keepers in the old stories—beings who existed at thresholds, who understood the weight of entrances and exits. But they were myth. Legend. Like so many things that had turned out to be terrifyingly real.
"State your business."
"The stars came back wrong." No explanation, just fact. "The name you buried remembered itself. I've come to see the child who speaks in syllables that remake sky."
My hand found the door's latch before I'd decided to move. But I didn't open it. Couldn't. Too many things had worn friendly faces before revealing hunger.
The latch turned on its own.
No—not on its own. Ashara stood beside me, having moved silent as shadow, her small hand turning the mechanism with deliberate purpose. No fear in her silver eyes. Only recognition.
The door swung open to reveal a woman wrapped in robes that seemed to be made of erased text. Words had been written on the fabric once—I could see the ghost of their shapes—but something had scrubbed them away, leaving only the memory of meaning.
"May I enter?" she asked, though Ashara had already stepped aside in clear invitation.
The door-keeper moved into our home with the careful grace of someone who understood that crossing thresholds meant more than simple movement. She studied our space—the fire, the symbols in the dirt, the way shadows fell—before her attention settled on Ashara.
"So young," she murmured. "So old. Time sits strangely on you, little speaker."
"Why are you here?" I kept myself between them, mother-wolf instincts screaming.
"To tell a story. To leave a warning. To see if the door I've guarded for seven lifetimes has finally found its key." She settled by our fire uninvited but somehow not intruding. "There was a god once. Before your kind learned to count stars. Before names meant anything more than sound."
Ashara sat across from her, abandoning her symbols to listen with that unsettling focus.
"This god had a name," the door-keeper continued, "but lost it in the first war between What Is and What Should Be. Since then, it has searched. Through bloodlines. Through prophecies. Through children born between states." Her eyes found mine. "You almost gave it back. When you held her between death and birth, when you thought that secret name—you almost set it free."
"I stopped myself."
"You stopped your mouth. But thoughts have weight in the spaces between. And your daughter..." She studied Ashara with ancient eyes. "Your daughter heard what you didn't say."
My blood chilled. The second name. The one I'd thought but never spoken, the shadow-word that had haunted us. Ashara had heard it in the womb. Carried it like a seed that might still sprout.
The door-keeper pulled something from her robes—a riddle-box, old wood worn smooth by handling. "May I test her?"
"No." The word came instantly.
"Yes." Ashara's voice, calm and certain.
The woman smiled and set the box between them. "What has a thousand names but answers to none? What opens every door but enters none? What was first spoken but will be last heard?"
Ashara didn't speak. Instead, her shadow moved.
It stretched across the floor, forming shapes that weren't quite letters, weren't quite pictures. The shadow-gestures flowed like water, like thought given form, answering in the language that existed before words divided meaning into sounds.
The door-keeper's smile widened. "The door remembers. It always remembers." She stood, leaving the riddle-box behind. "The name will knock again soon. It's patient, but not infinitely so."
She moved toward our threshold, then paused, pulling something else from those strange robes. A fragment of mirror, no bigger than my palm. "For the mother who almost spoke. Sometimes we need to see what watches back."
I took it reflexively, glancing at my reflection—tired, worried, protective. Normal. Human. Mine.
Then I turned away, and in the corner of my eye, the reflection blinked.
Not simultaneously. After. As if it needed a moment to remember to copy my movements.
When I spun back, it was just a mirror. Just my face. But the wrongness lingered like oil on water.
The door-keeper vanished into the night without farewell, leaving only the scent of threshold-spaces and the weight of unfinished business.
I found Ashara hours later, curled asleep beside the mirror fragment. Her lips moved in dreams, shaping words that had no sound. Above us, through the window, I watched the stars rearrange themselves again. Not chaotically this time. Purposefully. Deliberately.
They were forming a name.
The name I'd sworn I'd never speak. The one I'd thought in that space between spaces, when divine possession and maternal fury had made my mind a door between worlds. It hung in the sky now, written in starlight, waiting for someone to read it aloud.
"The name isn't just returning," I whispered to the night, to Dorian, to myself. "It's finding new ways to be heard."
And beside me, my daughter smiled in her sleep, as if she'd heard a friend calling from very far away.
The door-keeper was right.
It would knock again.
And I was running out of ways to keep it closed.
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