The Things That Knock in the Night

The first knock came with the moon's rise.

Three strikes against nothing. Not wood, not stone—just sound shaped into impact, hanging in the air like a question nobody wanted answered. I sat up from our makeshift bed, hand already on my belly where the child stirred in response.

"Did you—"

"I heard it." Dorian was already on his feet, knife in hand, scanning the darkness beyond our fire's reach. His shoulders held the particular tension of prey that knew it was being watched but couldn't see the watcher.

We waited. Counted heartbeats. The forest held its breath with us, even the insects falling silent as if they too recognized that some sounds didn't belong to the natural world.

Three more knocks. Same rhythm. Same impossible absence of source.

"It's closer," I whispered.

He nodded, jaw tight. We'd been hearing them for the past two nights—always three, always that same deliberate cadence. Like something patient working its way through a ritual we didn't understand.

"Sleep," he said. "I'll keep watch."

But sleep and waking had grown strange borders lately. I closed my eyes and opened them in silver.

Not the garden this time. I stood in ruins that might have been a temple or might have been a cage—walls of tarnished moonlight, floors of crystallized whispers. Water pooled in corners that shouldn't exist, and in each pool, my reflection wore a different face. Different ages. Different endings.

"Mother."

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. My child, but refracted through glass and time and the particular echo of things that existed between states.

"Where are you?"

"Where I've always been. Where I'll always be." One of the reflections smiled with my mouth but not my intention. "Between the knock and the opening. Between the question and its answer."

I knelt by the nearest pool, tried to touch the surface. My hand passed through—not into water but into space that had forgotten how to be solid.

"The knocking," I said. "What is it? What wants in?"

All the reflections tilted their heads in unison, a gesture that sent ripples through every surface.

"Not all doors are opened," they said with the child's voice multiplied into chorus. "Some are knocked down. Some are knocked through. Some remember they were never doors at all."

"I don't understand—"

"You will." The child's presence pressed against my consciousness, warm and terrible and mine. "When the third mother wakes. When stone remembers it was flesh. When the knocking comes from inside."

The ruins shattered like sugar glass, and I gasped awake to Dorian's hand on my shoulder.

"Aria. Look."

I followed his gaze and felt my blood turn to ice water.

One of the mouthless statues from the temple road stood at the edge of our camp. I knew with the certainty of nightmares that it hadn't been there when I'd closed my eyes. Its carved robes still held the dust of its hillside post, its chiseled-away mouth still wept stone tears. But it was here. Twenty miles from where it should be. Facing us with eyes that saw too much for stone.

"I watched it move," Dorian said, voice carefully controlled. "Thought I was dreaming. Thought the lack of sleep was—but no. It walked. Stone walking like flesh. Stopped just outside the firelight and hasn't moved since."

I rose slowly, the child heavy in my belly, pulling me toward the earth with more than physical weight. As I stood, something new bloomed in my mind. A name, repeating like a heartbeat:

Velara. Velara. Velara.

I'd never heard it before. Never planted it in any garden of memory. But it filled my mouth with the taste of silver and old grief, with the particular flavor of names that carried too much history to be spoken safely.

"Do you hear that?" I asked Dorian.

"Hear what?"

But he couldn't. The name was mine alone, whispered by something that recognized the statue for what it truly was. Not just stone. Not just warning. But—

My palms split without warning. Silver blood welled from wounds that opened along the life lines, and I bit back a cry. The blood didn't fall—it moved with purpose, tracing symbols up my arms. Glyphs I couldn't read but felt in my bones. Summoning and protection twisted together into syntax that predated language.

"Your arms," Dorian breathed.

I looked down to see the symbols glowing beneath my skin, making my flesh translucent. For a moment, I could see through to the bone, to the marrow where prophecy bred with biology to create something neither.

Three knocks echoed.

Inside the circle of our fire.

We both spun, searching for the source, but there was nothing. Just the sound, patient and deliberate, coming from air that had learned to be solid enough to strike.

"It's not—" I started.

"I know." Dorian grabbed my arm, pulled me close. His eyes held the kind of fear that came from understanding too much too fast. "Whatever's following us... it doesn't want the child. It wants what comes after it."

The words hit like physical blows. I'd been so focused on what grew inside me, on the prophecy-child that made oracles choose silence, that I'd never considered—

What came after birth? What door might a child become? What threshold might I be carrying that others had tried to lock in stone?

Velara, the name whispered again, and this time I understood. Not the child's name. Not mine. But the name of the mother who'd stood where that statue stood. Who'd seen what was coming and chosen calcification over speaking. Who'd become her own warning, written in stone.

The statue shifted.

Just slightly—a tilt of the head that stone shouldn't be able to manage. In the firelight, I could swear I saw its chest rise and fall. Once. As if it was remembering how to breathe.

"The third mother," I whispered, pieces clicking together with the terrible clarity of puzzle solving itself. "The oracles. The statues. They weren't just prophets. They were—"

"Mothers." Dorian finished, understanding dawning in his voice. "Mothers who saw what their children would become. What would come through them. And chose—"

"Stone." My hand found my belly, where my impossible child turned and turned, restless with proximity to its ancient sister. "They chose to become their own tombstones rather than birth what they carried."

The statue's head turned fully toward us. In the space where its mouth should have been, a crack appeared. Thin as hair, but growing. Behind it, darkness that might have been void or might have been throat.

Three knocks sounded again. This time, I felt them in my bones. In my womb. In the child who answered with three kicks of its own.

"It's not the child they fear," I whispered, the truth of it settling over me like a shroud. "It's the door it might become."

And somewhere in the darkness beyond our fire, stone began to speak.