The Mother Who Was Never Taught to Stay

I woke with someone else's hunger in my mouth.

Not for food—though my stomach churned with needs I couldn't name. This was deeper. A craving that started in my bones and radiated outward, searching for something that didn't exist yet. Or existed too much. The distinction blurred when you carried prophecy beneath your ribs.

Sweat soaked through the thin fabric of my shift, but I shivered with cold that came from inside. The second heartbeat—stronger now, more insistent—drummed against my spine like tiny fists demanding attention. Demanding acknowledgment. Demanding a name I didn't have yet.

Mother.

The word arrived not as sound but as certainty, pressed into the soft tissue of my brain by something that hadn't learned speech yet. I pressed my palms against my belly, felt the slight swell that hadn't been there days ago. Or had it? Time moved strange when you were becoming a door.

In my dreams, I'd been feeding something I couldn't see. A mouth that opened wider than mouths should, whispering names into my spine with each swallow. Not threatening—tender. Like a child learning its first words by stealing them from its mother's memories.

But the names it whispered weren't mine to give.

Aria.

I tried to think my own name, to anchor myself in that simple truth. But it came out wrong, multiplied, refracted through whatever grew inside me. Aria-who-was. Aria-who-is. Aria-who-might-be. We were becoming plural without my permission, and I couldn't find the edges of where I ended and it began.

I needed air. Space. Distance from this body that was teaching itself to be a universe.

Moving carefully to not wake Dorian, I rose on legs that felt borrowed. Each step sent the second heartbeat racing, as if movement excited it. As if it knew we were going somewhere important.

The forest opened before me. Not welcoming—watching. Trees leaned back to create a path I hadn't asked for, their branches forming archways that looked too much like birth canals. Moss glowed faintly where my bare feet touched, leaving prints that pulsed with borrowed light.

I followed the pull without thinking. Something ahead called to me—not with voice but with the particular gravity of things that needed witnessing. A stone, maybe. Or a tree old enough to remember when gods were just frightened children learning to name themselves.

The path spiraled inward. Always spirals now. Always the shape of things returning to themselves.

I found it in a clearing that breathed with its own rhythm: a tree whose roots rose from the earth like reaching fingers, each one glowing faintly with veins of silver. The same silver that pulsed beneath my skin. The same light that had marked me as different, dangerous, chosen.

I reached for the nearest root, and it reached back.

The connection was immediate. Overwhelming. Through the wood, I felt the tree's slow thoughts, its patient accumulation of years. But more than that—I felt its awareness of what I carried. Its recognition of the thing that grew inside me, cell by sacred cell.

Mothers do not get to run.

The whisper came from the roots, the air, my own throat. Truth wrapped in bark and bone. My feet grew heavy—not with exhaustion but with the weight of being claimed. The slight swell of my belly glowed through my shift, silver-bright and undeniable.

The child was grounding me. Making me too real to fade, too present to flee. Each pulse of its heartbeat drove invisible roots from my feet into the earth, anchoring me to this moment, this choice, this terrible possibility of staying.

"Aria?"

Dorian's voice, rough with sleep and worry. I didn't turn. Couldn't. The tree held me in its gentle grip, and I was learning things I didn't want to know.

"You should be sleeping," I said to the roots.

"So should you." His footsteps came closer, careful on the glowing moss. "But here we are, following you into another impossible place."

He found me kneeling in the dirt, both hands pressed against roots that pulsed with my own heartbeat. The look on his face—concern mixed with something that might have been awe—made my chest tight.

"Let me help," he said, reaching for me. "We can go. Find somewhere safe. Somewhere—"

"You didn't grow it."

The words came out sharp enough to cut. I saw him flinch but couldn't stop the flood that followed.

"You didn't grow it. I did. You don't feel it calling me mother when I haven't even said yes. You don't hear it learning my memories, eating my names, making itself from pieces of me I thought were gone."

My voice cracked. The tears came then—first I'd shed since becoming human again. They tasted of silver and salt and the particular grief of being chosen for something you never asked for.

"What if I fail it?" The question ripped from somewhere deeper than my throat. "Like they failed me? What if it's not a child—it's a prophecy, and I'm just the dirt it grew from?"

Dorian knelt beside me, careful not to touch. Smart man. I might have burned him with the fear radiating from my skin.

"You were never dirt," he said quietly. "Even when you planted yourself. Even when you grew gardens from grief. Never just dirt."

"But I leave." The truth of it sat heavy on my tongue. "It's what I do. What I've always done. Leave before I'm left. Run before I'm rejected. How do I stay for something that needs me when staying is the only thing I never learned?"

The shard at my hip flared to life, violent and sudden. Its heat cut through my spiral of self-pity, demanding attention. In the space between heartbeats, it showed me:

Visions. Futures. Possibilities.

Me, swollen with divine pregnancy, giving birth to something that looked like starlight given form. The child opening eyes that held too much, speaking its first word—and that word unmaking everything it touched. Cities crumbling. Wolves forgetting how to be wolves. The moon itself cracking like an egg.

Choose the world, the shard begged. Not the wound.

It offered its old bargain, dressed in new urgency. It could take the child's soul before it fully formed. Could burn out this seed before it grew into something that might unmake everything I'd fought to protect. All I had to do was let it.

The second heartbeat thundered, as if sensing threat. My hand moved to the shard, fingers brushing its burning surface.

It would be easy. Had always been easy to choose destruction over creation, ending over beginning. I was good at endings. Had made an art of them.

But.

My other hand pressed against my belly, feeling the warmth there. Not the shard's burning, but something else. Life-warmth. Possibility-warmth. The kind of heat that came from things growing in darkness, waiting for their season.

I pulled my hand from the shard.

"No."

Simple word. Hardest word. The shard's scream of frustration rattled my bones, but I held firm. Whatever grew inside me—prophecy or child or something between—it was mine. Had chosen me as much as I'd accidentally chosen it.

That had to mean something.

Dorian's hand found mine in the dirt. Not pulling, not pushing. Just there. Anchor and witness both.

I wrapped my arms around my belly, gently. First time I'd held it instead of pressing against it, prodding it, fearing it. The second heartbeat slowed, as if recognizing the embrace.

"I don't know if I can love you yet," I whispered to the thing inside me. To the child-prophecy-wound that grew cell by cell toward whatever it would become. "But I haven't left."

It was the only promise I could make. The only truth I could offer. Not love—not yet. Not welcome—too soon. But presence. The simple act of not running when every instinct screamed flight.

Maybe that was enough. Maybe that was everything.

The tree's roots pulsed once more, then released their hold. I could move again, could run if I chose. But I stayed there in the dirt, holding what grew inside me, letting Dorian hold what he could reach of me.

Learning, slowly, what it might mean to be the mother who didn't leave.

Even when staying felt like the hardest thing I'd ever done.

Even when the child inside me whispered names I'd never heard, in voices I'd never forget.

Even then.

Especially then.