The Child Who Began to Speak in Dreams

Morning light filtered through our makeshift shelter with the gentleness of forgiveness. I woke to Ashara's small sounds—not crying, just the contented murmurs of a baby discovering her own voice. The weight of her in my arms felt like proof that some battles could actually be won.

Dorian moved quietly in the background, grinding herbs for tea. The scent of rosemary and something earthier filled our small space, grounding me in the blessed ordinary. His movements carried the careful grace of a man learning fatherhood—protective but not hovering, present but not intrusive.

I changed Ashara's cloth, marveling at how normal it felt. No cosmic significance in the task, no prophecies written in the folds. Just a mother tending her child. She latched eagerly when I offered my breast, tiny fingers splaying against my skin with perfect trust.

"Hungry little moon," I murmured, settling back against the wall.

She hummed while she nursed—a new habit that made my heart squeeze with simple joy. I hummed back, the old lullaby my mother had sung, the one that had been twisted and reversed through our trials but now flowed forward as it should.

Then she matched me. Note for note. Perfect pitch.

I stopped, but she continued, her infant throat producing sounds too precise for her age. Not just the melody—the exact tonal quality I'd been thinking but hadn't voiced. The harmony I'd heard in my head during the mirror-child's dissolution.

"Dorian."

He was beside us instantly, tea forgotten. "What is it?"

"Listen."

Ashara pulled away from my breast, milk still on her lips, and made a sound. Not quite word, not quite song. But I recognized it with sick certainty—the first syllable of the second name. The one I'd swallowed, the one that lived in the spaces between breath.

The fire flickered though no wind touched it. Outside, branches creaked in windless protest. A family of rabbits I'd seen near our shelter suddenly bolted, white tails flashing panic.

"She's just making sounds," Dorian said, but his hand had found his blade. "Babies do that."

"Not like this." I adjusted Ashara against my shoulder, patting her back with hands that wanted to tremble. "She's speaking things she's never heard. Things I've only thought."

As if to prove my point, she burped—a perfectly normal baby sound—then whispered something in the old tongue. A phrase I'd thought but never spoken during labor, when the god tried to wear her skin.

The day progressed in fragments of wrong. Ashara would be perfectly normal—cooing, grasping, doing all the things babies should—then something would slip. A gesture too deliberate. A sound too knowing. The way she'd turn toward empty air as if listening to conversations we couldn't hear.

By evening, exhaustion pulled her into deep sleep. I laid her in the nest of furs, watching her chest rise and fall, trying to convince myself that everything was fine. We'd won. She'd chosen to be singular, human, ours.

But her sleep was wrong.

Her tiny fists moved through the air, grasping at nothing—no, not nothing. Patterns. Symbols. As if she were pulling threads from dreams and weaving them into something I couldn't see. Her perfect lips moved, shaping words without sound.

I leaned closer, needing to know what haunted her sleep.

My mother's voice emerged from my daughter's mouth. Not similar—exact. Speaking my childhood name with the same gentle scold she'd used when I'd stayed out past dark. Then the voice shifted, became Dorian's from years ago, before we'd met, speaking to someone I didn't know about choices he'd never shared.

More voices followed. Prophets reciting litanies. Oracles speaking in tongues. And then—Lucien. Not recent Lucien, broken by our reunion. Young Lucien, before the crown, whispering promises to stars that didn't care.

My daughter was collecting voices like shells on a beach. Storing them. Preserving conversations that had happened before her conception, dreams that belonged to no one living.

"How can she hold so much?" I whispered, not expecting answer.

Dorian's hand covered mine. "Maybe she's not holding them. Maybe they're holding her."

The thought chilled deeper than winter wind. Before I could respond, Ashara's sleeping form tensed. Her mouth opened wider, and what emerged wasn't baby-talk or collected memory.

It was prophecy.

The words came broken, filtered through infant vocal cords not meant for such weight: "Child of the echo... speaker of the swallowed name... she who voices what gods fear to echo... the silence breaks with her first true word..."

The fire responded to each syllable, pulsing like a heartbeat. The earth trembled—just enough to knock a clay jug from our shelf. It shattered, and the pieces formed a pattern I didn't want to recognize.

"I've heard that before," Dorian said quietly. "Years ago. Long before you. A blind priestess in the Moon Temple spoke those words." His jaw tightened. "She clawed her own eyes out afterward. Said she'd seen too much in the speaking."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I thought it was madness. Temple smoke and twisted faith." He looked at our daughter, still mouthing ancient words in her sleep. "I never imagined it was prophecy waiting for her to be born."

Ashara's eyes flew open. Not the slow wake of infant-need, but alert, aware, focused on something beyond our walls. Sweat beaded on her tiny brow as if she'd run miles in her dreams.

I gathered her close, murmuring comfort, but she pushed back. Her small hand rose to my face, fingers finding my lips with disturbing precision.

"Don't name it," she whispered.

The fire died instantly, not banked but extinguished as if it had never been. The growing dusk outside deepened to full night in a heartbeat. Shadows stretched across our floor, reaching further than geometry allowed.

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the moment passed. Ashara blinked, yawned, and settled back into normal sleep. Just a baby again. Just ours.

But the chill remained.

Dorian rebuilt the fire while I held our daughter, both of us moving in careful silence. When warmth finally returned to our shelter, we sat close, shoulders touching, watching Ashara breathe.

"It's not over," I said finally.

"No." He took my hand, threading our fingers together. "The birth was just the beginning. Now she has to learn to speak. And we have to learn what happens when she does."

I thought of the second name, still lurking unfinished in my throat. Of prophecies that used infant mouths as doors. Of my daughter, so small and perfect, carrying words that had driven grown prophets to madness.

"What if she speaks something we can't take back?" I asked the darkness.

Dorian's grip tightened. "Then we face it. Together. Like we've faced everything else."

But as I watched Ashara sleep—her lips still moving slightly, still shaping sounds I couldn't quite catch—I wondered if love would be enough when the time came.

When our daughter finally spoke her first true word, what doors would open?

And what would crawl through?