The Dream That Bled Into the Waking

For a moment, I forgot we were fugitives from fate. The kind of moment that always comes before something wakes up.

Dawn crept through the canopy like an apology, touching everything with tentative gold. Ashara lay curled between us, her tiny chest rising and falling with breath so slow I had to watch for several heartbeats to confirm she was still with us. Not dangerous—just unnaturally calm, as if she'd found some deep place to rest that normal infants never reached.

Dorian slept beside us, but even in dreams his hand curved toward his sword. The habit of hunted things. His face, usually sharp with vigilance, had softened in sleep. I wanted to trace the lines that worry had carved there, to smooth them away with touch. Instead, I watched the forest watch us back.

The trees didn't move. Nothing moved. But awareness pressed against my skin like humid air before a storm.

Sleep pulled me under again before I could resist.

The dream came sideways, slipping through cracks in my exhaustion. One moment I was watching Ashara breathe—the next, I walked through a field of night-blooming flowers that hummed variations of my name. Not Aria exactly, but close. Ari-ya. Air-eee-ah. Ah-ree-uh. Each bloom spoke a different version, as if testing which one fit best.

In the field's center grew a tree I recognized with sick certainty. It was shaped like my own ribcage, white bark curved into familiar bones. Its branches held fruit I didn't want to name—sleeping versions of Ashara, each one slightly different. Some had silver eyes, some gold. Some breathed, some didn't. All of them were mine and not mine, possible and impossible.

One was awake.

She climbed down with the careful grace of a child who'd never learned to fear falling. Nine, maybe ten years old, wearing a dress made of moonlight and shadow. Her eyes were stitched shut with silver thread, but she navigated perfectly, as if sight was just one way of seeing.

"You never taught me how to dream safely," she said, voice carrying the weight of years we hadn't lived yet. "So I borrowed yours."

"Ashara?" My voice came out broken, unsure which version of my daughter stood before me.

"Sometimes." She tilted her head, considering. "Sometimes I'm the one you saved. Sometimes I'm the one you didn't. Dreams don't care about choosing."

The field began to shift. Flowers wilted into teeth, petals becoming enamel, stems turning to exposed nerves. The ribcage-tree wept—not sap but blood, thick and warm and mine.

"You're changing things," I said, backing away from the spreading corruption.

"No, Mama." Her stitched eyes somehow conveyed infinite sadness. "I'm showing you what's already changing. What happens when you leave names unfinished. They grow wild."

The ground beneath my feet turned liquid. I ran, but in dreams, distance is negotiable. The field stretched forever, yet I crossed it in three steps. The tree loomed, then vanished. And through it all, that child who might be Ashara watched with eyes that couldn't open.

I woke gasping, hands already reaching for my daughter. She was there—small, real, breathing. But her lips moved with words I'd never taught her, syllables that tasted of the space between sleeping and waking.

A faint glyph pulsed beneath her skin, just below her collarbone. The same mark I'd carried during pregnancy, when divine fire had tried to remake us both. It shouldn't be there. I'd been so careful to keep her separate from what I'd been.

"She's leaking." Dorian's voice, quiet beside me. He was awake, had been watching.

"What?"

"Her dreams. They're leaking into the world." He nodded toward a puddle near our camp. In its surface, two moons reflected—one whole and familiar, one cracked down the middle like an egg about to hatch.

We sat in shared silence, watching our daughter remake reality with unconscious will. Her whispers grew clearer, almost words, almost names. Each syllable made the air shimmer.

"I think she's dreaming of the future," I said, needing to fill the space between us with something other than fear.

"Or of a mother she still wants you to become." His hand found mine, calloused fingers threading through my own. The touch sparked need I'd been suppressing—not just physical but deeper. The hunger to be held by someone who'd seen me unmade and still chose to stay.

We leaned into each other, two bodies remembering they were more than weapons, more than shields. His breath warmed my temple. My free hand found the curve of his jaw. For a moment, we teetered on the edge of forgetting everything but skin and want and the desperate need to affirm life in the face of so much almost-death.

"Not here," I whispered, though every cell screamed otherwise. "Not like this. Not when the world still expects to take her from us."

He nodded against my hair, but neither of us pulled away. We held the moment like a caught breath, knowing we'd have to exhale eventually but not yet, not yet.

A sound rose from the forest—a lullaby, almost identical to mine but played backwards. Each note was correct but wrong, like looking at your reflection and seeing it blink first.

Ashara woke with a cry that was all infant, all fear. Real tears, not dream-silver, tracked down her cheeks.

"Shh, little one. You're safe." I gathered her close, but she pulled back to look at me with eyes that weren't quite right.

"Someone is singing with my name in their mouth," she said, too clear for a baby, too knowing for comfort. "But it's not me."

I checked her over with shaking hands. Everything seemed normal—ten fingers, ten toes, one heartbeat. But in her left eye, where silver should reign alone, a ring of gold circled the pupil.

"That's not mine," I breathed.

The second name—the one I'd left unfinished, the one that had no mouth to speak it—was finding other ways in. Through dreams. Through songs. Through the gold slowly claiming my daughter's silver gaze.

Night fell like a curtain. We built a protection circle with herbs Dorian had saved and blood he freely gave. I found myself drawing sigils I didn't remember learning, my hands moving with knowledge that felt borrowed from futures we hadn't lived yet.

In the firelight, Ashara's eyes drooped again. But before sleep claimed her fully, she spoke one more time:

"Mama, I dreamed someone wore your face but didn't love me."

The words hit like physical blows. I held her tighter, humming the lullaby forwards, always forwards, trying to drown out its reversed echo in the trees.

We slept inside that circle, pressed close as one creature with three hearts. But I couldn't shake the feeling that one of us had already left it behind.

In my dreams, a child with stitched eyes whispered: "You can't protect her from what she's already carrying. The name finds a way. It always finds a way."

And somewhere, in the space between Ashara's golden ring and silver iris, something patient began to spell itself into existence.