The words came from Ashara's sleeping lips like water from a broken dam—fluid, unstoppable, wrong.
"The court finds you guilty of choosing flesh over eternity. Of binding yourself to mortality when divinity called. The sentence is remembrance—you will know all you could have been, forever."
I sat frozen beside her makeshift bed, listening to my infant daughter speak in the measured tones of cosmic judgment. Her voice layered with echoes of age she hadn't lived, authority she'd never wielded. Yet.
"I chose love," she continued, and now the voice was different—older, defiant, recognizably hers despite the impossible years it carried. "I chose to be born. To be held. To be human. If that damns me, then I accept damnation."
Dorian shifted in the doorway. He'd been listening too, jaw tight with the effort of not intervening. Outside, the forest stood frozen beneath stars that pulsed in patterns that made my teeth ache. Even the wind had stilled, as if nature itself strained to hear these words that shouldn't exist.
"She's not cursed," I said when Ashara's sleep-speech finally faded to normal infant breathing. "She's echoing."
"Echoing what?"
"A future. A past. A timeline that's bleeding through." I touched her forehead—warm, human, present. "She's remembering things that haven't happened. Or have happened. Or might."
"We could bind it." His suggestion came careful, testing. "There are spells, old ways to—"
"No." The word came sharper than intended. "No more binding. No more sealing. She's not broken, Dorian. She's just... receiving memories from versions of herself that chose differently."
He studied me with those amber eyes that had seen too much. "And if those memories take root? If she becomes what she's remembering?"
I didn't have an answer. How could I, when each night brought new impossibilities?
Ashara stirred, not waking but moving with purpose. She stood—that eerie toddler grace that belonged to no child—and walked toward the door. We followed, twin shadows to her moonlit form, as she led us through frost-touched grass to a clearing I'd never seen before.
The ground hummed.
Not audibly. Deeper. The kind of vibration that lived in bones, in the spaces between heartbeats. As Ashara stepped into the clearing's center, the earth responded—softening, warming, revealing patterns beneath the soil. Moon Temple ruins, ancient beyond measure, pulsing with patient life.
"How is this here?" Dorian's hand found his sword, though steel meant nothing against architecture that existed more in memory than stone.
"It's always been here," I heard myself say. "We just couldn't see it until she remembered it existed."
The moment my foot crossed into the ritual circle, time split.
Not dramatically. Subtly. Like looking through water and seeing your reflection fractured into possibilities. I saw myself standing here in spring, in winter, in seasons that hadn't been invented yet. I saw Ashara at different ages—infant, child, woman, crone, infant again—all occupying the same space, all equally real.
"Don't." Dorian's warning came too late.
I'd already reached for her hand.
The vision hit like drowning in starlight:
A silver court that existed in the spaces between worlds. Ashara stood at its center, but not my Ashara. This one wore centuries like a cloak, her eyes holding the weight of choices made across a thousand lifetimes. Beautiful. Terrible. Alone.
"You stand accused," the court intoned—not voices but concepts given sound, "of choosing limitation. Of binding infinite potential to finite form. Of selecting love over duty."
This ancient Ashara smiled, and in that expression I saw my daughter's defiance written large across eternity. "Guilty. Eternally guilty. I chose to be born to a woman who would teach me that power means nothing without someone to protect. Who showed me that love weighs more than godhood."
"The sentence is remembrance. You will carry all you abandoned. See all you might have been. Know forever the weight of choosing less when you could have been more."
"Then I will carry it gladly." She turned, and for a moment her eyes met mine across impossible time. "Because she taught me that 'less' and 'more' are just words. What matters is choosing."
The court dissolved, but the sentence remained. Memories of unlived lives pouring backward through time, seeking their origin, finding my daughter's infant mind and taking root like seeds that would bloom into confusion.
I clawed my way back to the present, dirt under my fingernails, Dorian's arms around me, holding me to a single timeline through will alone. My throat felt raw—I'd been screaming. The clearing spun, or I spun, or time itself hadn't quite settled back into linear flow.
"Mama?"
Ashara stood before me, fully awake now, those silver eyes holding too much knowledge for her tiny face. But her voice—her voice was just hers. Young. Present. Concerned.
"I'm here," I managed. "I'm—"
"They remember me." She said it calmly, a statement of fact like observing the weather. "All the mes I didn't become. They remember and they're angry that I chose you instead."
My heart shattered and reformed in the space of a breath. This impossible child, carrying the weight of infinite possibilities, had chosen us. Chosen mortality. Chosen love. And the universe itself was punishing her for that choice.
"Then we'll make them forget," I whispered, pulling her close, feeling how solid she was despite the memories trying to claim her.
She nestled into my arms with the trust of the truly young, even as ancient knowledge moved behind her eyes. "How?"
I didn't know. Had no idea how to fight memories that existed outside time, how to protect her from the selves she'd chosen not to become. But I was her mother. I'd already defied gods and prophecies and the natural order itself for her.
What was one more impossibility?
"By being so present they can't reach through," I said, hoping it could be that simple. "By loving you so fiercely that all those other versions seem pale beside this one. By choosing you, again and again, until choice becomes stronger than fate."
Dorian's hand settled on my shoulder, grounding us both. "Together."
"Together," I agreed.
Above us, the wrong stars pulsed their alien message. Around us, the buried temple hummed with recognition. And in my arms, my daughter carried the weight of infinite roads not taken.
But she'd chosen this one.
Chosen us.
And if the universe wanted to punish her for that choice, it would have to go through me first.
The memories could rage. The other timelines could bleed through.
We would remain. Present. Defiant. Family.
And maybe, just maybe, that would be enough.
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