The God With No Eyes

The cabin squatted between twisted pines like a memory trying to remember its own shape. Walls that should have been straight curved inward, and the door hung at an angle that made my eyes water. But it had a roof, mostly intact, and walls that might keep out whatever was singing through the cracks in the sky.

"Better than nothing," Dorian said, though his hand stayed on his sword.

We'd been walking for hours since the prophetess died, each step taking us deeper into wrongness. The forest had forgotten how to be a forest. Trees grew downward in places, roots reaching for sky. Streams ran in perfect circles. And always, always, that tuneless singing from above—not quite music, not quite screaming.

Inside, the cabin was worse. Time had pooled in the corners like standing water. A chair aged to dust while we watched, then reformed young and whole, then aged again. The fireplace burned with flames that cast shadows in the wrong directions.

"Don't touch anything," I warned, though Dorian was already spreading our single blanket on the floor, choosing the spot that seemed most stable.

My hand went to my belly. Ashara had been quiet since the prophetess's warning, curled tight and still. But I could feel her consciousness, awake behind closed eyes. Listening. Waiting.

"She's afraid," I said.

Dorian looked up from checking his wound—still seeping but no longer flowing. "Of what?"

"I don't know. Something new. Something that wasn't there before we—"

Sleep hit me mid-sentence. Not natural exhaustion but a pull like undertow, dragging me down before I could resist. My knees buckled. Dorian caught me, lowering me to the blanket, but I was already gone, pulled into dreams that weren't mine.

The first thing I saw was absence.

Not darkness—darkness implies the possibility of light. This was the space where eyes should be, carved out and left gaping. The Blind God had no face, only a collection of mouths, each one whispering in languages that predated words. Some spoke prophecy. Some spoke madness. All spoke hunger.

It moved like smoke through ruins I almost recognized—temples, maybe, or the bones of the first world. Each mouth opened and closed in rhythm, tasting possibilities, savoring futures that withered at its touch.

"Little vessel," one mouth said, and I realized it was speaking to Ashara, not me. "Little door. You opened what should stay closed. You refused to be many, so now the many refuse you."

Another mouth laughed, the sound of civilizations falling: "Did you think choosing one name would save you? Names are just masks. I'll wear yours better than you ever could."

I tried to scream, to wake, but I wasn't really there. I was just a passenger in my daughter's nightmare, watching through eyes that hadn't opened yet as this thing circled her unformed soul.

"Your mother broke the Mirror," a third mouth whispered. "Shattered my blessed blindness. For that, I'll take what she loves most—not her life, but yours. I'll climb inside your name and be born wearing your potential."

The mouths smiled in unison, an expression that belonged on no face, in no reality.

"When you crown, I'll crown. When you breathe, I'll breathe. And when your mother holds you for the first time, it will be me she's cradling."

"NO!"

I woke thrashing, but my body was already moving. Not in the cabin—I was outside, barefoot in frost, walking toward something that glittered in the moonlight. A puddle that reflected too perfectly, showing not the cracked sky above but the mirror plane I'd escaped.

Hands reached up from the surface. Some mine, some wearing my face but wrong. They grabbed for my ankles, my wrists, trying to pull me back into multiplicity.

"Aria!" Dorian's voice, distant but getting closer. "Stop! It's not real!"

But it felt real. The hands were warm, familiar. They whispered promises—if I came back, if I let myself fracture again, maybe the God couldn't focus on just one child. Maybe—

Dorian tackled me sideways, away from the puddle. We hit the ground hard, his wounded side taking the impact. He cried out but didn't let go, arms locked around me as I fought to return to the reflection.

"It's not you," he gasped. "Whatever you're seeing, it's not you. Come back. Come back to me."

His voice, his warmth, the specific weight of his arms—these things were singular. Real. Mine. I stopped fighting, going limp against him as the puddle's surface went dark.

"I saw it," I whispered. "The thing the prophetess warned about. It wants to replace her. Wants to be born as her."

We stumbled back to the cabin, Dorian half-carrying me. Inside, I noticed what I'd missed before—the stars were gone. Not hidden by clouds. Gone. The sky through the window showed only the spreading crack and a moon that looked too much like an eye.

Then I felt it. Hot and sharp on my shoulder blade. I pulled down my shirt, twisting to see, and Dorian's intake of breath confirmed what I feared.

A new scar. Silver and fresh. But not mine.

It was Ashara's.

"She's marking herself," I breathed. "Trying to claim her own body before—"

My voice changed mid-sentence. Not my tone—the voice itself, becoming younger, older, desperate: "He wants to wear my name. He wants to be born in my place."

Ashara, speaking through me while she slept. Speaking her terror into the world.

Dorian gripped my shoulders, grounding me. "We won't let that happen."

"How?" My voice again, cracking with exhaustion. "How do we fight something that existed before names?"

He was quiet for too long. When he finally spoke, his words carried the weight of old guilt: "I've seen it before."

I pulled back to study his face. "What?"

"Years ago. Temple raid in the northern territories. I thought I was going mad—visions of mouths without faces, singing about births that would unmake the world." He met my eyes, amber dark with memory. "I saw you, Aria. Pregnant, screaming, giving birth to something that wore a child's shape but spoke with the voice of endings."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I thought it was madness. Temple smoke. Battle-fever." His hand cupped my face. "I never imagined it was prophecy about the woman I'd love. About our daughter."

Our daughter. Who even now fought for the right to be herself, carving scars into my skin to mark her territory. Who refused to be erased or replaced, even by gods.

The cabin shuddered. Not from wind—from presence. Something vast had found us.

A voice spoke through the trees. Not Ashara's young uncertainty. Not the God's hungry mouths. This was older, female, carrying the weight of centuries:

"Aria."

But that wasn't the name she used. She spoke something else—syllables I'd heard only once, whispered by my mother as I was born, never repeated. My true name. The one written in no record, known by no oracle.

"You broke the silence," the voice continued, coming from everywhere and nowhere. "You opened the door. And now He will come wearing your daughter's skin."

The forest responded to the words. Light bled downward from the cracked sky, pooling in patterns that hurt to perceive. Inside me, Ashara seized—not with her own movement but with something else's attempt to move through her.

I pressed both hands to my belly, feeling the alien rhythm. This time, it wasn't her kick I felt—it was someone else trying to climb out.

"No," I whispered, then louder: "NO. This is my daughter. Mine. Not yours, not fate's, not any god's. MINE."

But the presence in the forest laughed, and the sound made the cabin's warped walls warp further.

The battle for Ashara had begun.

And I was already losing.