The Child Who Dreamed Too Loudly

The mirror-born child walked across the cabin floor with steps that made no sound. She moved like memory given form, each gesture too perfect, too practiced, as if she'd rehearsed being human for longer than humans had existed.

Real Ashara slept in my arms, breath warm against my chest. The other one—my other daughter, god help me—stopped just out of reach and tilted her head with that horrible fluidity.

"You don't remember, do you?" Her voice came from everywhere and nowhere, adult inflections wearing an infant's face. "You named me the first time you imagined her. Before conception. Before flesh. That was enough. I became a shape waiting for breath."

"You're not real," I whispered, but the words felt like lies even as they left my mouth.

"I was real before she was." The false Ashara gestured to the sleeping bundle in my arms. "Every night you dreamed of holding a daughter. Every time you whispered 'Ashara' to the darkness, hoping. I heard you. I became what you wanted."

Dorian tried to raise his blade, muscles straining, but the air had gone thick as honey. Time bent around the mirror-child, protecting her or maybe just acknowledging what she was—a thing born of temporal loops and desperate wanting.

"I loved you before she did," the mirror-child continued, and for the first time, something like hurt flickered across her too-perfect features. "I existed first. Why shouldn't I stay?"

The words triggered something buried deep. Memory surfaced like a drowning thing finally finding air.

I was seven. Fever-sick. My mother had left me with wet cloths and worried prayers, but in the delirium, I'd found something else. A bundle in my arms, warm and weightless. I'd rocked it, sung to it, given it a name pulled from nowhere—

Ashara.

The fever broke. The bundle vanished. But I'd carried that ghost-weight in my arms for years, the phantom child I'd named in sickness and forgotten in health.

Until now.

"You remember." The mirror-child smiled, and it was my smile, the one I'd practiced in puddles as a girl. "You called me into being with love so pure it survived twenty years of forgetting. How is that less real than meat and bone?"

Real-Ashara stirred, and both versions of my daughter opened their mouths at the same moment. The same word emerged from both:

"Stay."

The harmony shattered something in my skull. I couldn't tell which voice belonged to which child, couldn't separate the plea from the command. They spoke as one, breathed as one, existed as one split between two bodies.

"Choose," Dorian gasped through the thickening air. "Pull one back. We can't hold both."

But how could I choose between the daughter I'd dreamed and the daughter I'd birthed? Between the love that came first and the love that came flesh?

Real-Ashara began to float again, her tiny body rising inches off my lap. Her eyes remained closed, but tears leaked from beneath the lids—silver tears that evaporated before they could fall. She was being pulled between states, neither fully here nor fully there.

My mother's voice echoed across decades: Dream anchors, little one. When the spirit wanders too far, we tie it back with things the dream-realm cannot swallow. Pain. Iron. Love worn close to skin.

My hands shook as I fumbled for Dorian's necklace—a wolf's tooth on leather, the one I'd clutched through labor, still stained with my blood and sweat. I wrapped it around real-Ashara's impossibly small wrist, the tooth resting against her pulse.

"If she remembers pain and warmth and dirt and iron," I whispered, "she'll stay real."

The effect was immediate. Ashara's weight returned, solid and sudden in my arms. She gasped—a very human sound—and her eyes flew open. Silver, yes, but with the unfocused wonder of true infancy.

The mirror-child stumbled.

"No." For the first time, she sounded young. Lost. "You're choosing her. But I tried so hard to be everything you wanted. I learned your lullabies before she could hear them. I loved you before she knew how."

My heart cracked. Because she was right. In every dream, every desperate night of longing, I'd built her. Piece by piece. A daughter made of wanting, perfect because she'd never had to be real.

I shifted real-Ashara to one arm and knelt before her echo. This close, I could see the differences—skin too smooth, eyes that reflected nothing, the absence of tiny imperfections that made life life.

"And you were beautiful," I said, reaching out to cup her cheek. She leaned into the touch, and for a moment, she felt warm. Real. Mine. "You were my first daughter. My dream daughter. But I only have arms for one."

"I know." Tears that weren't quite water tracked down her face. "I always knew. But I hoped... I hoped loving you first would be enough."

I pressed my lips to her forehead, tasting moonlight and memory. "Thank you. For keeping me company all those years. For being the daughter I could hold when my arms were empty."

She smiled then—not the too-perfect expression from before, but something crooked and genuine and heartbreaking.

"Will you remember me?"

"Always."

"Then I can let go."

She shattered.

Not violently. Gently, like morning frost touched by sun. She became light, then mist, then nothing, each particle singing the name I'd given her as it dissolved. The mirror cracked behind her, finally closing the door between dream and waking.

I curled around real-Ashara, who yawned and nuzzled closer, already forgetting her brief journey between worlds. Dorian collapsed beside us, the paralysis finally breaking. His arms came around us both, anchoring us to this moment, this reality, this choice.

"Is it over?" he asked.

I wanted to say yes. Wanted to believe choosing had ended it. But on the wall, visible only in the dying firelight, were scratches that hadn't been there before. Tiny marks, as if made by an infant's fingernail in sleep.

The second name. Written backwards. Still unfinished.

"She's gone," I said, which was true.

But names, I was learning, were patient things. They could wait. They could find other dreamers, other voices, other daughters to wear.

For tonight, though, I held my single, solid, perfectly imperfect child and sang her the lullabies I'd once sung to empty air. She fell asleep to the sound, wolf's tooth pressing gentle marks into her wrist, tethering her to a world of blood and bone and beautiful limitation.

The mirror stayed cracked.

The name stayed unfinished.

And somewhere between sleeping and waking, Ashara smiled with only one mouth, dreaming dreams that belonged to no one but herself.