The dream came again that night, the same fragmented sequence that had visited me periodically since first waking in Aria's body — not the palace, not the portal, but a small farmhouse kitchen thick with the smell of bread, a woman's voice humming something in a dialect I somehow understood despite never consciously learning it.
I woke before dawn, Darius still asleep beside me, and lay staring at the ceiling trying to hold onto the dream's dissolving edges before they scattered entirely.
Mira. The name arrived unbidden, the way fragments of this other life always did — sudden and complete, then gone before I could properly examine them. Not Elian's caretaker Mira from before the portal, but someone else, someone from whatever life had apparently existed inside Aria's memory before I'd arrived to inhabit it.
"You're awake early," Darius murmured, stirring beside me, clearly more perceptive to my restlessness than I'd credited even half-asleep.
