I woke from a dream of my daughter with a thousand eyes, each one whispering my name in voices I'd never heard. The sound followed me into waking—a susurrus of "Aria" spoken by mouths that had never drawn breath.
The cabin was cold despite the fire burning steady. Wrong cold—the kind that came from inside, from spaces between heartbeats where dread made its home. I found Ashara by the wall, piece of charcoal in her small fist, drawing with movements too precise for her age.
Spirals that hurt to follow. Stars in configurations that matched neither memory nor the twisted sky outside. And in the center, written with careful strokes, a name I didn't remember teaching her.
Luminara.
"She's been at it since before dawn," Dorian said from the doorway. His travel satchel sat packed beside him, every line of his body ready for flight. "We need to move. Now."
"To where?" I didn't look away from our daughter's artwork. "The stars are wrong everywhere. Running from the sky won't change what's coming."
"Staying here won't either."
He was right. I knew he was right. But exhaustion had settled into my bones like lead. How many times could we flee? How many thresholds could we cross before we ran out of world to run to?
The mirror fragment pulsed on the table—a heartbeat of light that drew Ashara's attention. She abandoned her drawing, small fingers reaching for the glass with the inevitability of tide seeking shore.
"Don't—"
Too late. Her skin met mirror, and the world tilted.
A voice echoed from behind the glass—Ashara's, but layered. Old beneath young, wisdom beneath innocence, something vast wearing the shape of my daughter's voice like an ill-fitting coat.
"Mother," it said, and the word contained multitudes. "Do you remember the night you invited me?"
The vision hit like ice water:
The night of conception. Dorian above me, moonlight painting silver across our skin. But for six seconds—I'd counted them even then, some instinct noting the wrongness—the moon had blinked out. Not clouded. Not dimmed. Gone.
In that darkness, something had slipped through. Not malevolent, not then. Just... possible. A potential that had been waiting for an opening, for a moment when reality's grip loosened enough to allow entry.
I'd conceived Ashara in those six seconds of cosmic absence. And something else had conceived itself through us.
I gasped back to the present, the taste of starlight bitter on my tongue. Dorian had moved to the window, staring at something outside with the kind of stillness that meant danger.
"This isn't our forest anymore," he said quietly.
I joined him, Ashara balanced on my hip, and saw what had stolen his words. The tree line wept. Silver sap oozed from cracks in bark that hadn't been there yesterday, pooling on ground that pulsed with its own slow heartbeat. The forest bled divine blood, and where it touched earth, flowers bloomed that had too many petals, colors that shouldn't exist.
Above us, the wrong stars pulsed in rhythm with the bleeding trees.
Ashara began to hum.
Not to me. Not to Dorian. Her face turned skyward, and the melody that emerged was answer to some celestial calling. Each note made the stars brighten, made the silver sap flow faster, made reality shiver like a struck bell.
"No." I grabbed her, shaking gently, trying to break the rhythm. "Not again. Not—"
Silence crashed down like judgment.
The humming stopped, but its absence was louder than sound. The world held its breath, waiting for something I couldn't name. Even the bleeding trees paused their weeping.
Then a star fell.
Not the streak of burning light we call falling stars. This was deliberate descent—a point of brilliance unhooking itself from the sky's fabric and drifting down like a snowflake made of compressed eternity. It landed in our fire without sound, without impact.
The flames turned silver.
Not reflected light. The fire itself transformed, burning cold and bright and wrong. And casting no shadows—as if light itself had forgotten how to create darkness.
I stared into those impossible flames and saw—
Myself. Years from now, decades maybe. My hair gone grey-white, my face carved by choices I hadn't made yet. Blood on my hands—not red but silver, divine ichor that would never wash clean.
I wore robes made of erased text. The door-keeper's robes.
Behind me stood Ashara, grown tall and terrible, her thousand eyes open and weeping stars. She spoke, and her voice made reality rewrite itself with each word.
"You always knew," future-me said, voice hollow with exhausted wisdom. "From the moment she quickened in your womb. She wasn't becoming something new. She was remembering what she'd always been."
The vision shattered when Ashara touched my face with one small hand. I was back in our cabin, silver fire still burning impossible, the taste of future-blood in my mouth.
"Mama sad," she said, and for a moment she was just my daughter. Just a child noting her mother's distress.
Then her eyes flicked to the mirror fragment, and I saw recognition there. Old recognition. The kind that came from meetings in other lives, other timelines, other configurations of reality.
"She's not just becoming," I whispered, the words scraping my throat raw. "She's remembering."
Dorian's hand found mine, grounding me in the present even as the future pressed close. "Remembering what?"
I looked at our daughter—this impossible child who drew names she shouldn't know, who hummed to stars that had rearranged themselves for her, who carried something in her bones older than the world itself.
"Everything," I said. "She's remembering everything."
The silver fire crackled, casting light that revealed too much. In its glow, I could see the threads connecting us all—past to future, mother to daughter, mortal to divine. A web of inevitability that tightened with each choice, each flight, each moment we pretended she was only ours.
Outside, the stars pulsed their alien message. Inside, my daughter smiled with too much knowing for her years.
And somewhere between, I stood on the threshold of becoming the very thing I'd feared—not a mother protecting her child from destiny, but destiny itself, wearing a mother's face.
The door-keeper had been right about one thing:
Some doors, once opened, could never fully close.
And we were running out of ways to pretend otherwise.
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