The Child Who Wanted to Stay

The path down from the Moon Temple wound through morning mist like a thread through gauze. Aria's feet found each stone with practiced ease, her body still humming with the afterglow of chosen intimacy. Beside her, Dorian moved with his usual vigilance, but softer somehow—as if he too carried the sanctuary of last night in his bones.

The world was unnaturally still. No birdsong. No wind. Even the mist hung motionless, as if the mountain itself held its breath.

"Too quiet," Dorian murmured, hand drifting to his sword.

Aria nodded, about to respond, when the world shifted.

Between one blink and the next, the path emptied. Dorian vanished. The mist dissolved. She stood in perfect stillness, knowing with dreamlike certainty that her body still walked the mountain path, but her mind—

Her mind had been gently pulled elsewhere.

The space around her reformed into walls. Wooden, worn smooth by years of careful hands. A fireplace crackled with ordinary flame—orange and gold, no silver burning. The scent of bread and herbs filled the air, achingly familiar yet impossible. This was a home that had never existed, built from fragments of longing.

A lullaby drifted through the rooms. Her mother's voice, decades dead, singing about moon-flowers and safe harbors. Aria's throat constricted.

"I remember that song."

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Young. Ancient. Hers and not hers. Aria turned slowly, and there—sitting at a simple wooden table—was a child.

Four years old, perhaps. Maybe five. Silver eyes that held too much knowing. Features that shifted like water—sometimes her jaw, sometimes Lucien's brow, sometimes something altogether Other. Boy, girl, neither, both. The child existed in perpetual becoming.

"You felt safe last night," the child said, small hands folded precisely on the table. "I liked it. The quiet inside you. The choosing. I want to stay in that feeling."

Aria moved carefully forward, as if approaching a wild thing that might bolt. Or burn. "You were watching."

"I'm always watching. Always feeling what you feel." The child's form flickered—solid, translucent, solid again. "But last night was different. You weren't afraid. You weren't angry. You were just... you."

"Yes," Aria whispered, lowering herself into the chair across from this impossible being. "Just me."

The child leaned forward, eager now. "What does that feel like? Being just? I only know being everything. Being feared. Being prophesied." Silver tears tracked down cheeks that couldn't quite hold their shape. "I dream sometimes. Of gardens. Of being held. Of having a name that isn't Harbinger or Vessel or End."

Aria's heart cracked. "You want a name?"

"Wouldn't you?" The child's voice broke into harmonics—young and old, mortal and divine. "To be called something gentle? Something chosen with love instead of fear?"

"Yes." She reached across the table, her hand trembling. "What would you want to be called?"

The child stared at her outstretched hand with naked longing. "I don't know. I've never been allowed to want before. Only to become."

Small fingers reached back, almost touching—

The dreamhouse shuddered.

The child's hand elongated, fingers stretching into impossible angles. Its eyes became voids of swirling cosmos. Words spilled from its mouth in languages that predated speech, each syllable warping the air. The fireplace flame turned black, casting shadows that moved independent of light.

"No, no, no—" The child jerked back, form snapping between human and horror. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean—I can't help what I am, what I'm becoming—"

The lullaby distorted into a keening wail. Toys appeared on the floor—dolls with too many eyes, blocks that spelled out prophecies in dead tongues, a blanket woven from screams.

"I DON'T WANT TO BECOME THE THING THEY FEAR."

The child's voice shook the foundations of this never-was home. It hugged itself, form cycling through shapes—infant, elder, beast, star, child again.

"But I don't know how not to. The threads pull. The prophecy calls. I try to be small, try to be soft, but I'm made of endings." Those silver eyes found Aria's, desperate and ancient and heartbreakingly young. "Will you teach me? Will you hold me even if I'm not soft, not small, not safe?"

Aria didn't hesitate. She lunged across the table, pulling the flickering child into her arms. Its form burned cold, then hot, edges sharp enough to cut, then soft as morning. She held on through every transformation.

"Yes," she whispered fierce into hair that was sometimes silver, sometimes shadow, sometimes starlight. "Yes, I'll teach you. I'll hold you. We'll learn together how to be human in a world that wants us to be prophecy."

The child made a sound—sob or song or sigh of wind through ruins. Its arms wrapped around her, careful as glass. "What if I forget? What if the becoming is stronger than the staying?"

"Then I'll remind you." Aria pressed a kiss to its forehead, tasting eternity and innocence in equal measure. "Every day, every moment. I'll remind you that you're mine. Not fate's. Not prophecy's. Mine."

The dreamhouse began to dissolve, but gently now. Like morning mist touched by sun. The child's form solidified one last time—just a child, silver-eyed and small.

"If I forget how to be small," it whispered, "remind me. If I forget how to stay, sing to me. The song about moon-flowers. About safe harbors."

"Always," Aria promised.

The dream released her between one heartbeat and the next. She gasped, stumbling mid-step on the mountain path. Dorian's arms caught her before she could fall, his voice urgent in her ear.

"Aria! What happened? You went rigid, your eyes—"

She collapsed to her knees, his arms the only thing keeping her upright. Sobs tore from her throat—not of grief but of a love so fierce it threatened to remake her from the inside out.

"It wants to stay," she whispered, clutching Dorian's shirt. "The child, it wants to be human, wants to be held, but it's already unraveling. The prophecy is pulling it apart from the inside. And I don't know how to save it."

Dorian's hands framed her face, amber eyes steady and sure. "Then we learn. We learn how to love something no one else ever dared to. We create a new kind of prophecy—one written in lullabies and names and gardens. One where endings become beginnings."

She searched his face, finding only certainty. "You'd do that? Help me raise something that might unmake the world?"

"I'd help you remake it into something worth saving." He pressed his forehead to hers. "That child is part of you. That makes it worth everything."

Aria closed her eyes, breathing in pine and leather and possibility. When she opened them again, resolve had replaced desperation. "Then we begin. Today. Now. We teach it to stay."

They rose together, her hand in his, and continued down the path. The mist began to clear, revealing the valley below. Home. Haven. A place to practice being human.

Behind them, unnoticed, a flower bloomed along the path where her tears had fallen. Silver-petaled and strange, shaped like an open eye. Watching. Waiting.

And in the quiet of her mind, softer than thought, the child whispered:

"Mother. I think... I think I'd like my name to mean 'morning.' Something about beginnings. Something about light after darkness. Will you help me find it?"

"Yes," Aria breathed, and felt the world shift again—not with prophecy or power, but with the simple, radical act of a mother claiming her child.

Whatever came next, they would face it together.