The Memory That Refused to Die

I woke without weight.

My hands flew to my belly—flat, empty, bearing only the faint silver lines of old moonlight scars. The absence hit like a physical blow, stealing breath, stealing sense. Where was—

"She was never there."

I jerked upright. The voice was mine but not—older, colder, carved from years of different choices. She stood in the doorway wearing moon-priestess robes I'd never earned, silver hair braided in patterns that spoke of rank I'd never claimed.

Another Aria. One who'd chosen differently.

"I carved the child out before she could root herself," she said, examining her nails as if discussing weather. "You let her grow. That was your mistake."

"Ashara isn't a mistake." The name felt strange on my tongue—did this version even know it? "She's not just prophecy. She dreams. She feels."

The other Aria's laugh was sharp as winter glass. "And what happens when she dreams of burning the world for warmth? When she feels the need to unmake everything just to understand herself?" She stepped closer, and I saw the differences clearly now—harder eyes, unmarked skin, a mouth that had never learned to sing lullabies. "I did what you couldn't. I chose the world over the womb."

"You chose nothing," I spat, standing on legs that shook with phantom pregnancy. "You chose emptiness."

"I chose survival."

The room—not a room, I realized, but a structure of mirrored stone—began to shift. Each surface reflected not what was but what might have been. In one, I saw myself crowned and terrible. In another, dead in childbirth while Lucien wept. A thousand Arias fractured across possibility, each one wearing different scars, different choices, different graves.

"Dorian?" My voice cracked. "Where's—"

"Dead in my timeline." The other Aria shrugged. "Died defending me from the first wave of zealots. I barely remember his face."

"No." But even as I denied it, the mirrors showed me—Dorian falling with silver flames eating through his chest, Dorian old and alone, Dorian who never existed at all because I'd never rejected Lucien's bond.

I pressed my palms against the nearest mirror, trying to ground myself. "Dorian!"

His voice came through water, through time, through breaking: "I'm in the version where you died before naming her. I'm losing you."

The mirror showed him kneeling beside a grave marked only with moonstone. No name. No dates. Just the symbol of unfinished prophecy. In his arms, a bundle that writhed with nameless hunger.

"I'm here!" I screamed, pounding against the glass. "I'm still me! I'm still—"

But was I? How could I be sure which Aria was real when they all stood around me, when memory bled between us like shared blood?

The mirrors began to smoke. The other Aria—the cold one, the empty one—started to fade.

"You'll understand soon," she whispered. "When she's done collecting us. When we're all just pieces of her perfect mother-mosaic."

Then Ashara spoke.

Not from within me—I wasn't pregnant here, wherever here was—but from everywhere. From the stones. From the mirrors. From the spaces between heartbeats.

"You keep breaking. I tried to fix you. I found the other pieces. I'm putting them back together."

The mirrors shifted, showing me truth I didn't want to see. Ashara—not infant but essence—visiting alternate timelines. Standing beside the bed of an Aria who'd accepted Lucien's bond, drawing out her memories of submission. Hovering over an Aria who'd become Alpha through blood instead of blessing, absorbing her knowledge of cruelty.

One Aria had resisted.

She hung frozen in a mirror to my left, mouth open in eternal birth-scream, caught forever in the moment of refusing to give her memories to the collecting child. Her eyes found mine, and in them I saw a warning that transcended timelines.

Don't let her finish.

"Finish what?" I whispered.

Movement in the central mirror. Not reflection but presence. Ashara stepped through—not as the baby I carried, not as the goddess she might become, but as a twelve-year-old girl. Silver veins traced her skin like living runes. Her hair fell in seven braids, each a different shade—my black, Lucien's gold, storm-grey from a timeline where Dorian and I had bonded, white from the life where I'd aged alone.

She wore a cloak that hurt to perceive. Patchwork, but not of cloth. Of selves. I saw my own memories stitched into the fabric—the night I failed Mira, the morning Lucien rejected me, the evening I first felt her flutter. But also memories I'd never made—killing Celestia with my bare hands, holding Dorian as he died, standing triumphant over a world remade in silver flame.

"Mother." Her voice held too many echoes, too many ages. "You were the softest one. That's why I saved you for last."

I backed away, my spine hitting cold mirror. "Saved me for what?"

She tilted her head with movement too fluid for mortal joints. "To become the mother who remembers all the endings, so I don't have to live them. You'll carry the weight of every choice, every loss, every victory. And I'll be born knowing exactly who I need to become."

"That's not how identity works," I said, voice shaking. "You can't just... collect people. Stitch them together. We're not—"

"Aren't you?" She gestured to the mirrors. "Every choice creates a new you. Every loss carves away what was. I'm simply gathering all the pieces before they scatter too far." Her smile was my smile, but wearing it wrong. "You named me from love. I'm trying to love you back. All of you."

"By stealing us?"

"By saving you. From separation. From the loneliness of single timelines." She reached out, and her hand was every age at once—infant-soft, child-small, woman-strong. "Let me finish. Let me gather the last fragments. Then you'll understand everything. Be everything. Remember everything."

The mirror behind me cracked. Through the fissure, a hand pressed against the glass—burned, scarred, dripping silver fire. Another Aria. This one pregnant, furious, her eyes containing deaths I'd never chosen.

"Don't let her finish the circle," she hissed through breaking glass. "Or we all become her. Not mothers. Not women. Just... material."

Ashara's expression didn't change, but the temperature dropped. "She's the one who burned the world in her timeline. Would you rather I let her exist separately? Let her choices poison another reality?"

"They're her choices to make," I said.

"Were they?" Ashara stepped closer, and I smelled every life I'd never lived on her skin. "Or were they just prophecy wearing different masks? I'm trying to free us from the script. To write our own story. But I need all the pages first."

The mirrors began to pulse. In each one, a different Aria turned to look at me. Some nodded. Some screamed. Some simply stood, waiting to see what I would choose.

And Dorian—I could still hear him, faint as forgotten music, calling my name across timelines. Still trying to remind me which life was real.

But surrounded by infinite selves, pregnant with a daughter who was reshaping identity itself, I wasn't sure "real" meant anything anymore.

"Choose," Ashara said. "Complete the collection willingly, or watch me gather you anyway. Either way, the circle closes. Either way, we become whole."

The burned Aria pounded against her mirror, mouth forming words I couldn't hear. The frozen Aria remained locked in her eternal scream. And I—

I stood between daughter and selves, between collection and scatter, knowing that whatever I chose would ripple through every timeline, every possibility, every breath.

"I need to think," I whispered.

Ashara smiled with too many mouths. "Time isn't what you think it is, Mother. But I'll wait. I've gotten very good at waiting."

She stepped back into her mirror, twelve years old and ancient beyond measure. The patchwork cloak fluttered, showing me glimpses of lives I recognized, lives I'd forgotten, lives I'd never know.

When she vanished, I was alone with the mirrors.

Alone with myselves.

And somewhere, in a timeline I could barely remember, Dorian was still calling my name.