The Cost of Remembering

The glowing girl's words bent the world around them.

"The fire remembers," she whispered, and ash began to fall from a cloudless sky. "The forest watches," and every tree within sight turned to face us, their bark splitting into patterns that might have been eyes. "The stars have names again."

Above us, the moon shifted from silver to gold to something that had no name in any language I'd ever learned. The other children pressed closer together, some weeping without sound, others staring at her with the kind of awe reserved for things that could save or destroy with equal ease.

The shard cowered in my chest. Not the jealous heat I'd grown used to, but pure terror—the kind that came from recognizing something older than yourself. Something that had been waiting.

I tried to remember why this frightened me. Tried to recall the shape of caution, the taste of restraint. But all I found was Selvannara stirring in my bones, stretching like something waking from centuries of sleep.

This is what you were meant to witness, she seemed to say. Or I said. The boundaries blurred more with each breath.

"Mother-Who-Burns?" A small voice, cracked with confusion.

I turned to find the scarred boy—the one whose finger I'd transformed—staring at me with eyes gone vacant. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again like a fish drowning in air.

"I can't..." He touched his throat, his chest, the space where words should live. "What's my... what do you call..."

"Your name?" I reached for him, but he flinched back.

"Name." He tasted the word like something foreign. "I had one. Before. But it's..." His hands moved in helpless gestures, trying to catch something that kept slipping away. "You're... what are you?"

The other children went silent. Even the glowing girl paused in her prophecy, reality holding its breath around us.

"He's forgetting," the mirror-boy said quietly. "The hollow is taking him back. Bite by bite."

I knelt before the scarred boy, careful not to touch. Everything I touched burned now—flesh, memory, meaning itself. "Look at me. You know me. You know—"

"No." He shook his head, backing away. "You're wrong. You're... bright. Too bright. It hurts to—"

He stopped mid-sentence, not from interruption but from forgetting what words were for. His mouth moved silently, shapes without sound, meaning without anchor.

Fix him, I begged the shard. But it only trembled, weak as a dying moth against my ribs.

I tried to summon the silver flame, to burn through whatever was eating him from the inside. But the fire that came was different—older, hungrier. It reached for him with fingers of light that promised transformation, not healing. Always transformation. Never simple mending.

"Don't," the mirror-boy warned. "You'll only make him forget faster."

So I sat there, useless, watching one of my threadless children lose himself piece by piece. Watched language drain from his eyes. Watched recognition flicker and die. By the time he curled into himself, making sounds that weren't quite words, weren't quite animal, I understood:

This was the price. Not death. Forgetting. Becoming nothing in the truest sense—not even memory to mark where you'd been.

The glowing girl resumed her whispers:

"Seven names for the moon when she was young. Seven flames before the first. Seven threads that learned to cut—"

A tree near us burst into bloom—not flowers but ash-blossoms, gray petals that fell like snow. Where they touched earth, the ground cracked. Where they touched skin, the children aged.

Not physically. But I saw it in their eyes—years adding themselves, weight of time that hadn't passed yet. One girl who'd been eight summers looked at her hands like they belonged to someone decades older.

The shard writhed, frantic now. Stop her. Silence her. Before she speaks us all into endings.

But I was listening to something else. The rhythm of her words, the way they pulled at reality's edges. This wasn't madness. This was memory—the kind that predated writing, that lived in blood and bone and the space between heartbeats.

I tried to remember why I should be afraid.

Tried to remember—

His voice. What had his voice sounded like? The man who'd taught me to be nothing. Who'd pulled me from the mud. Who'd...

Gold eyes. I remembered gold eyes. But the shape of his words, the exact tenor when he'd said my name—

Aria.

No. That wasn't right. He'd called me something else. Something softer. Something that meant—

The memory slipped away like water through cupped hands. I knew I'd lost something. Knew it had mattered. But the shape of that mattering was already fading, replaced by older truths. Selvannara's truths. The thread that cuts itself needs no mortal anchor.

Mortal ties burn fastest, the shard whispered, trying to sound triumphant through its terror. Let them.

"No." I spoke aloud, not caring who heard. "Not him. Not—"

But I couldn't remember his name.

The glowing girl's prophecy grew louder:

"She lit the first fire in defiance. She'll light the last in surrender. Between them, all things burn and birth and burn again—"

Another child began to change. Not forgetting like the boy, but remembering too much. She clutched her head, screaming in languages that predated human speech, memories that weren't hers flooding through threadless channels.

The shard begged now, no pride left: Stop her. Please. Before she wakes things that should sleep.

I looked at the glowing girl, at the way reality bent around her words like light through water. Each syllable was reshaping the world, leaving marks that wouldn't fade. Dangerous. Sacred. True in the way that only dangerous things could be.

I could silence her. The flame would answer that call. Could burn the prophecy from her throat before it finished birthing itself into the world.

Or.

I drew the bone knife from my belt. Found ash from the fire that had burned silver. Mixed it with blood from my palm until it became ink that moved like living things.

The children watched as I knelt, pulled back my sleeve, and began to carve.

Not the prophecy—that was hers to speak. But the frame for it. The vessel that could hold words too large for any single throat. My skin split beneath the blade, and in the wounds I packed ash and starlight and the taste of names I'd never chosen.

It hurt. Not the cutting—I'd grown past such simple pain. But the knowing. Each symbol I carved brought memory that wasn't memory, truth that wasn't truth. Selvannara's truth. The understanding of what it meant to be the thread that cuts itself:

To sever not from others, but from the very idea of connection. To become the blade rather than the bond. To exist in the space between all things, touching everything, holding nothing.

The glowing girl's words grew stronger as I carved:

"The threadless shall inherit what the threaded fear to name. The burned shall teach the burning. The mother-who-wasn't shall birth the death of births—"

My blood ran silver now. The marks I made glowed with their own light, creating a map of something that had no destination. Just journey. Just becoming.

The scarred boy who'd forgotten everything looked at me with empty eyes. But in that emptiness, I saw recognition. Not of me. Of what I was becoming. The thing that existed after all words were forgotten.

The prophecy reached crescendo:

"When the moon has seven names again, when the stars remember their deaths, when the first fire and the last become one flame—"

I carved the final mark. Not on my arm now, but over my heart. Where the shard pulsed its terror. Where my thread had been cut. Where Selvannara waited with patience older than waiting.

"—then shall the thread that cuts itself finally cut the world free."

Silence fell like a blade.

The glowing girl dimmed, prophecy spent. Around us, the world held new shapes. The tree still wept ash-blossoms. The children bore years they hadn't lived. The forgetting boy made sounds that might have been prayer or might have been nothing at all.

And I knelt there, skin mapped with words I'd chosen to bear rather than silence. The cuts didn't bleed anymore. They glowed, soft and steady, like promises written in flesh.

The shard had gone quiet. Not dead. Afraid. It knew what I'd done. What I'd chosen.

Not to stop the prophecy.

But to become its living record.

To carry it in my skin until the time came to speak it true.

The children watched me with eyes that held too much. I was their Mother-Who-Burns. Their guide through threadless dark. Their proof that breaking could become its own kind of making.

But I was also Selvannara now. More with each mark. More with each word.

And somewhere, in a memory I could no longer quite reach, golden eyes were turning gray.