The First Thing to Crawl Through

The world had gone quiet in the way that precedes screaming.

No birds. No wind. Even our footsteps seemed to fall into silence before they could disturb the air. Above us, the crack in the sky pulsed like a wound trying to remember how to bleed, and the moon—when it appeared at all—flickered like a dying lantern.

Ashara hadn't moved in hours.

Not the gentle flutter of sleep, not the restless turning of dreams. Just... stillness. As if she too was holding her breath, waiting to see what would crawl through the fissure her naming had torn.

I hummed to fill the silence, needing something familiar to anchor myself. But the melody that emerged wasn't mine. Too slow. Too old. Notes that dragged like grief through ancient throats, a lullaby meant for children who would never wake.

It made me want to cry, though I couldn't say why.

"That's not your song," Dorian said quietly.

I stopped, throat closing. "I... I don't know where it came from."

He watched me with eyes that held too much careful observation, like I might dissolve if he looked away. When had he started looking at me like that? Like I was already half-ghost?

The birthing circle was painted in moon-blood, and she stood at its center with crown heavy on her brow—

I gasped, stumbling. The memory hit like a physical blow—vivid, visceral, and completely impossible. I'd never worn a crown. Never stood in any birthing circle except—

"Push," the midwife commanded, but Velara only laughed. "Why should I birth tomorrow's executioner? Let it rot in my womb like the love that made it."

"Aria?" Dorian's hands on my shoulders, grounding me in the present. "What's wrong?"

"I remembered..." I pressed fingers to my temples, trying to catch the edges of something that shouldn't exist. "A woman. Velara. She was—I was—" The words tangled. How could I explain remembering a life I'd never lived?

Inside me, Ashara trembled. Not with power or purpose, but with the confused terror of something trying to build itself from broken pieces. She was pulling on timelines like threads, weaving an identity from whatever she could reach.

"Let's rest," Dorian suggested, guiding me to a fallen log. "Just for a moment."

I sat, grateful for the solidity of wood beneath me. But when I looked at him—really looked—something was wrong. The scar on his jaw seemed different. Longer? Shorter? Had it always curved that way?

"How did you get that scar?" I asked, needing confirmation of a shared history.

His face went carefully neutral. "Defending you. In Thornfield. Remember?"

I did. I remembered. But I also remembered it differently—a scar earned in battle against silver-flame zealots, protecting not me but a woman with storm-colored eyes who'd loved him unto madness.

"Your eyes," I whispered. "What color are your eyes?"

The pain that flashed across his face was worse than any physical wound. "Amber. They've always been amber, Aria."

"I know. I know. I just—" I reached for him, needing to touch something real. "I can see other colors behind them. Like pages in a book I'm reading all at once."

He caught my hand, held it tight. "You said you'd choose me. No matter what."

"I don't even remember what color your eyes are."

The words escaped before I could stop them, hanging between us like a severed thread. I watched devastation bloom across his features, watched him rebuild his walls stone by stone.

"Then I'll stay," he said finally, voice rough with unshed grief. "Until you do. Even if I have to remind you every day."

The love in those words—the terrible, patient love—brought me back to myself for a moment. This man. This moment. This timeline where I was Aria who loved Dorian, who carried Ashara, who'd defied prophecy for the right to choose.

"Help me remember," I whispered.

But before he could answer, movement in the periphery caught our attention. On the hillside above us, silhouetted against the cracked sky, stood a statue I'd never seen before. Ancient stone carved into the shape of a woman holding a child—or holding the absence where a child should be.

As we watched, one stone finger twitched.

Then two.

The statue's eyes—closed for centuries—began to open. Not quickly. With the deliberate patience of something that had waited through the death of civilizations for this moment. When the lids finally parted, there were no carved pupils beneath. Just smooth stone that somehow still managed to see.

Above us, birds that didn't exist anymore arranged themselves into words:

She opened a name that was meant to stay closed.

"Run," Dorian breathed.

But I couldn't move. Inside me, Ashara was speaking—not in the voice of a child or a god, but as something fractured, glitching between states:

"I can't be born until I know who I am. But the world only remembers how to name me 'End.' Give me something else. Give me something new. Give me—"

Her voice shattered into frequencies that made my teeth ache. I tasted copper and starlight, felt my bones trying to remember other shapes they'd worn in other lives.

Dorian half-carried me away from the waking statue, but I could feel its attention following us. Not malevolent. Worse—curious. As if wondering what kind of mother opens doors that should stay closed, what kind of child needs to steal memories to build itself a soul.

We ran until the world blurred, until time felt more like suggestion than law. When we finally stopped, gasping, we stood at the edge of something that shouldn't exist—a cave that breathed, that pulled at the air like lungs learning rhythm.

From within came the sound of crawling. Not claws on stone. Something worse—the wet drag of memory trying to take physical form.

It emerged in pieces. Smoke that might have been hair. Limbs that couldn't decide their number. Half-faces cycling through expressions of women I'd been, could have been, never was. It was built from every Aria that had never existed—the one who saved Mira, the one who accepted Lucien's bond, the one who died before any of this could begin.

It looked at me with eyes borrowed from my own reflection and spoke a single word:

"Mother."

Not to me. To whatever I was becoming. To whatever Ashara was making me remember.

I pressed both hands to my belly, feeling my daughter's confusion like a second heartbeat. She was trying so hard to exist, pulling pieces from every timeline, every possibility, trying to build herself a story that wouldn't end in prophecy.

"I think something just remembered me," I whispered to Dorian, "before I existed."

He held me tighter, as if love could anchor identity. Above us, the crack in the sky widened another fraction, and through it, more memories began to fall like rain.

Each drop that touched my skin brought another life I'd never lived.

Each one made it harder to remember which one was real.

Inside me, Ashara wept in frequencies only the broken sky could hear, and I hummed her a lullaby in languages I was forgetting how to speak.