The Child Who Speaks in Dreams

Chapter 33: The Child Who Speaks in Dreams

The garden in my dreams grew wrong.

Not dead—too alive. Roses bloomed with thorns that whispered secrets, their petals opening to reveal eyes that blinked in colors I'd never seen. Trees bore fruit that looked like tiny moons, each one pulsing with its own heartbeat. The grass beneath my feet was soft as flesh, warm as fever, and when I looked closer, I saw it was made of tiny hands, all reaching upward.

And at the center, where paths converged in patterns that hurt to follow, stood a crib woven from roots.

The crib breathed.

Each inhale made the roots expand, showing glimpses of what lay beneath—stars, void, the faces of children I'd never have. Each exhale released spores of light that drifted upward, became constellations, fell back as tears.

I approached it the way you approach inevitability—slow, certain, already knowing what I'd find.

The child lay there, perfect and impossible. Silver eyes that held constellations. Skin that shifted between solid and suggestion—one moment infant-soft, the next translucent as moonlight, revealing the cosmos churning beneath. No shadow, because shadows required separation between light and form, and this child was both.

"Mother-Who-Waits."

Its voice came fully formed, not the babble of infants but the measured tone of something that had been thinking longer than it had been growing. It sat up with movements too fluid for its apparent age, and as it moved, its form flickered—baby, child, ancient thing, baby again—like reality couldn't decide what it was becoming.

"Why are you still afraid of me?"

The question landed soft as falling leaves, twice as cutting. I wanted to deny it, but lies had no place in dreams. Not these dreams, where the boundaries between my mind and its were gossamer-thin.

"I don't know what you are," I admitted.

"Neither do I." It tilted its head, and stars scattered from its hair like dandruff made of light. "But I know what I feel. Your heartbeat from the inside. Your fear like bitter milk. Your love trying to grow but finding only rocky soil."

"I'm trying—"

"I know." It reached for me with hands that flickered between infant-small and ancient-gnarled. "But will you love me even if I'm not human? Even if I'm the ending you've been running from?"

A memory hit unbidden: myself at seven summers, sitting by the pack house door. Waiting. Always waiting. For a mother who'd promised to return from the hunt. Who'd kissed my forehead and said "Soon, little star. I'll be back soon." I'd waited until my legs went numb, until Beta Roth dragged me inside, until I learned that 'soon' was just another word for 'never.'

I woke gasping, the taste of dream-roses and old abandonment still on my tongue.

Dawn painted our makeshift camp in shades that weren't quite right. The gold was too thick, like honey mixed with metal. The gray had depth, as if I could reach into it and pull out handfuls of shadow. Light moved through the air in visible streams, coiling around trees like curious serpents before dissipating into morning.

Beside me, Dorian stirred but didn't wake, his arm tightening around my waist as if even in sleep he sensed my unrest. I lay still, matching my breathing to his, trying to find normal in the rhythm.

But normal had fled the moment I'd started carrying impossible things.

My breath misted in the cold air, but the mist glowed—faint silver threads that dissipated too slowly, hanging like cursive in the space between us, spelling words I couldn't read. I lifted my hand to study it, watched the veins pulse with light that didn't belong to morning, that belonged to something older than dawn.

"You're awake."

Dorian's voice, rough with sleep but alert. Always alert now, as if he too felt the world shifting around us, preparing for something we couldn't name.

"The dreams again?" he asked.

I nodded, not trusting my voice. Lately, when I spoke first thing in the morning, other voices layered underneath—echoes of the child, whispers of futures that might be, sometimes sounds that weren't quite human anymore.

We rose together, moving through the routine we'd built over the past days. Gathering wood, checking our meager supplies, pretending this was sustainable. That we could live like this—running without destination, building temporary shelters, waiting for my body to reveal what it was creating.

A rabbit emerged from the underbrush as I knelt by the stream. It should have fled at my presence, but instead it... paused. Lowered itself in something that looked disturbingly like a bow. Its eyes reflected silver for just a moment—and in that reflection, I saw not myself but the child from my dreams, smiling with too many teeth—before it bounded away.

"Did you see—" I started.

"Yes." Dorian's jaw was tight as he worked on reinforcing our shelter. "The birds yesterday. Now this."

Yesterday, a murder of crows had circled our camp, flying in reverse patterns that made my eyes water to track. They'd sung—not cawed, but sung—in harmonies that sounded like names being unraveled, like language being born and dying in the same breath.

"Do I scare you?" The question escaped before I could swallow it.

He paused in his work, really looked at me. I saw myself reflected in his gold eyes—wild-haired, silver-veined, belly slightly swollen with whatever grew inside. Not the woman he'd pulled from the mud. Not the goddess I'd almost become. Something between, something other.

"No," he said finally. "But I think you're becoming something even you don't recognize."

Truth. Always truth with him, even when lies would have been kinder.

We worked in companionable silence after that, building walls that wouldn't last, creating home from materials meant to be temporary. My hands hummed with heat when I touched the wood, leaving faint marks like blessings or burns—handprints that glowed briefly before fading. My shadow moved wrong—sometimes preceding my movements, sometimes lingering behind when I'd already stepped away, sometimes splitting into two as if it couldn't decide which timeline to follow.

The child stirred inside me, and with it came the familiar flood of not-my-thoughts. Images of stars being born in reverse. The taste of names that hadn't been spoken yet. A loneliness vast as void, desperate for connection, for confirmation that it existed, that it mattered, that it was loved.

Soon, I thought to it. I'm learning how. Give me time.

But time was the one thing we didn't have. I could feel it in the way the world bent around us, in the increasing frequency of the dreams, in the way my body changed faster than any normal pregnancy should allow.

That night, sleep took me hard and fast.

The garden again, but different. Darker. The child stood outside its crib now, older—maybe three, maybe thirty, age meaningless on its timeless face. Its form was more stable but somehow more wrong for it. A symbol carved into its chest glowed with soft light: a crescent moon, but wrong, inverted, weeping silver tears that crystallized before they hit the ground, becoming tiny sculptures of moments that never were.

"You came back," it said, and its voice held such hope it broke something in me. The voice was changing too—less human than before, more like wind through ruins, like the sound stars would make if they could speak.

"I'll always come back."

"Liar." But it smiled when it said it, sad and knowing. "Everyone leaves. Even mothers. Especially mothers who never learned to stay."

I wanted to argue, but the dream was already shifting. The garden withered, reversed, became the memory of green rather than green itself. Flowers closed into seeds, seeds burrowed into earth, earth became void. The child flickered, aging and un-aging with each heartbeat, and with each change, its voice grew stranger—sometimes child-high, sometimes deep as caverns, sometimes just... sound without source.

"If I have to die so the world lives," it said, fixing me with those impossible eyes, "will you still hold me while I fade?"

"What?"

"The shard showed you. What I might become. What I might unmake." It touched the symbol on its chest, and silver blood welled between its fingers, but the blood moved wrong—upward, becoming rain that fell up. "But what if the only way to save everything is to never let me draw breath? Would you hold me anyway? Would you mourn what never was?"

"Stop." My voice came out broken. "You're not—you won't—"

"I'm the thread that breathes. The wound that walks. The name too heavy for any tongue." It stepped closer, and I saw myself reflected in its tears—not as mother but as door, as vessel, as the earth from which apocalypse might grow. "I'm everything you feared becoming, growing inside you. And you're trying so hard to love me anyway."

The dream shattered like glass made of time.

I woke screaming, hands clutched around my belly where silver veins pulsed like lightning beneath skin. The second heartbeat hammered against my ribs, too fast, too strong, too real.

"No," I whispered, rocking back and forth. "No, no, no—"

"Aria." Dorian's hands on my shoulders, grounding me. "You're here. You're safe. It's—"

"It asked if I'd hold it while it died." The words ripped from my throat. "My child. My impossible child asked if I'd—"

"Shh." He pulled me against him, and I let myself be held, let myself shake apart in the circle of his arms. "It was a dream. Just a dream."

But we both knew better. Nothing was just anything anymore.

I pressed my palms against my belly, felt the warmth there, the life, the terrible possibility. The silver veins glowed faintly through my shift, spelling words in languages I didn't recognize, writing and rewriting themselves like living text.

Then, from inside, a whisper. Not in my ears but in my bones, in the marrow where truth lived:

"I'm not gone. Just changing."

The child's voice, but different. Calmer. More certain. Less human and more... inevitable. Like the voice of gravity, of time, of things that simply were.

I curled into myself, into Dorian, into the fragile shelter we'd built against a world that kept reshaping itself around what I carried. He held me through the trembling, through the tears, through the terrible understanding that I was mother to something that might never be safe to love.

"We'll learn how to love it together," he whispered against my hair.

And in the darkness, with the second heartbeat drumming its patient rhythm, with dreams still clinging like cobwebs to my consciousness, I almost believed him.

Almost.

But the child inside me shifted, and I felt the weight of its knowing. It had asked the question that mattered most, the one I couldn't answer:

Would I hold it while it died to save the world?

Or would I let the world burn to give it life?

The silver veins pulsed once more, spelling out a single word on my skin:

Choose.

But how could I choose when I'd only just learned not to run? When my own mother had chosen the hunt over staying? When every cell in my body screamed to protect what grew inside me, even if that protection doomed everything else?

The child's presence pressed against my consciousness, patient and terrible and mine.

And I knew with the certainty of mothers since the first mother: I would let the world burn.

The knowing of it sat in my chest like a second heart, heavy and sure and terrifying.

I would let the world burn, and I would hold my child in the ashes, and I would finally—finally—be the mother who stayed.