I woke to a sunrise that couldn't decide which horizon to claim.
The sky bled violet at both edges, two suns rising in impossible tandem, their light meeting in the middle like colliding waves. The wrongness of it scraped against my consciousness, making my teeth ache with cosmic dissonance.
"Dorian?" My voice came out rough, uncertain.
He stood at the edge of our makeshift camp, body rigid with the particular stillness of someone caught between sleeping and waking. When I touched his shoulder, he flinched, eyes focusing on me with difficulty.
"I was in the field," he whispered. "Where we lost them. Marcus. Jenna. The others." His voice cracked on names I'd heard him speak only in nightmares. "But it wasn't then. It was now. They were dying now, asking why I let it happen again."
Around us, the glade had lost its gentle luminescence. Animals moved in disturbing patterns—a rabbit hopping in perfect circles until its legs gave out, birds singing their dawn chorus backward, notes reversing into something that sounded like screaming. A deer stepped into view, opened its mouth, and spoke in a voice like wind through leaves:
"Ashara."
Then it collapsed, legs twitching in rhythms that matched no natural convulsion.
My daughter slept on, peaceful in her nest of blankets. But her lips moved silently, shaping words or dreams or the space between. Each breath she took seemed to pull reality slightly askew, as if she were inhaling order and exhaling chaos.
"She's dreaming reality sideways," I breathed, understanding hitting cold.
I needed space, needed to think. I kissed Ashara's forehead—she didn't stir—and stepped away from the camp. Three steps. Four. Then the world folded.
I stood in my old bedroom in the Alpha's house.
The scent hit first—leather and pine, Lucien's cologne that he'd worn to mask the wild beneath. Silk sheets I'd never been allowed to touch. Moonlight through windows that had been shattered years ago.
"Aria!" Mira's laugh echoed from the hallway. "Come on, we'll be late for the ceremony!"
My heart clenched. Mira, who'd died because I'd been too afraid to meet her. But when she appeared in the doorway, I saw the truth immediately. Her movements were wrong—too smooth, too perfect. A puppet dancing on dream-strings, moving only when the dreamer remembered to animate her.
"This isn't real," I said.
"Real is relative." Lucien's voice, behind me. I turned to find him standing by the window, but not the Lucien I knew. This one had no scars, no weight of crown and failure. This was the Lucien of might-have-beens. "She needs to see why you became a mother."
"She's too young to understand—"
"Understanding comes later. First comes the knowing."
The dream pressed against me, trying to convince me of its reality. But I'd learned to recognize the texture of Ashara's dreaming—too bright, too meaningful, everything symbolic rather than true. I reached for the knife at my belt, the silver blade my mother had given me, and drew it across my palm.
Pain shattered the illusion.
I gasped back into the glade, but something was wrong. My rejection scar—the mark Lucien had carved into my soul when he'd denied our bond—was bleeding. Fresh blood soaked through my shirt, as if the wound had just been made.
"Aria!" Dorian caught me as I swayed. "What happened?"
"She's stitching reality with pieces of my past." I pressed my hand to the bleeding mark. "But she doesn't understand what she's using. She's pulling pain and trying to make it into structure."
The ground beneath us trembled. The silver blossoms that had bloomed in response to Ashara's joy now withered, their light dying as dream-logic overwrote natural law. Together, we carried our daughter deeper into the glade's heart, seeking... what? Safety? Understanding?
What we found was worse.
A cradle rose from the earth—not wood or wicker but stone, carved with symbols that hurt to perceive. It pulsed with dreamlight, each throb calling to the child in my arms.
"No," I said, but the word had no power here.
She stood beside the cradle like she'd been waiting.
Not flesh. Not ghost. Something between—an echo given form by a dreaming child's curiosity. She wore my face, but older, marked by choices I'd never made. Midnight war-paint traced patterns across her skin, and her smile held all the cruelty I'd ever considered but never embraced.
Velara. The echo of who I might have been.
"Hello, little mother," she said, voice like mine but stripped of warmth. "She's pulling me from your spine. From the marrow of your maybe. From the part of you that wondered, late at night, what if I hadn't spared anyone?"
"You're not real."
"Real is what she dreams." Velara circled us, movements predatory but curious. "And she dreams of knowing her mother. All of her mother. Even the parts you buried beneath mercy and love."
"Stay away from her."
"I can't." The echo's smile widened. "She's the one reaching. Into your shadows, your silences, your what-ifs. She wants every piece of you, even the ones that would horrify you to claim. Are you sure she can survive that much truth?"
Ashara stirred in my arms, responding to the presence of this other-mother. Her eyes opened—not fully, just slits of silver—and she looked at Velara with the terrible focus of recognition.
"Can you teach a child to choose wisely," Dorian asked quietly, "before she knows what choices mean?"
The question hung between us like a blade. How could we guide someone who could dream new realities before understanding the weight of the ones that already existed?
"We teach her by choosing for her," I decided. "Until she's ready. Until she understands that not every truth needs to be worn."
My mother had told me about it once—dream-bracketing. The art of creating boundaries around a sleeping mind, especially one that leaked into the world. I'd thought it was metaphor, the kind of wisdom that sounded pretty but meant nothing.
Now I understood it was survival.
I laid Ashara in the stone cradle—it felt like surrender, but I needed both hands free. From my pack, I pulled three items: a fragment of wood where I'd carved our lullaby, still humming with the memory of every time I'd sung it. A piece of Dorian's coat, torn during our flight from the Moon Slayer, still carrying his scent and steadiness. A stone from the altar where she'd been born, still warm with the miracle of choice over prophecy.
I arranged them around her—anchor points in the storm of possibility.
"Memory of song," I whispered, touching the wood. "Memory of protection," to the cloth. "Memory of beginning," to the stone.
The effect was immediate. The world stopped bleeding at the edges. The twin suns flickered and merged back into one, rising from its proper horizon. The animals ceased their disturbing loops. And Velara—
"Clever," she said, already fading. "But she'll come for me again. The curious ones always do. They need to know what darkness tastes like before they can choose light." Her form wavered like smoke. "And I'll be waiting. In your spine. In your silence. In every moment you chose mercy when you wanted vengeance."
She vanished, but her promise lingered like perfume.
I gathered Ashara from the stone cradle, which crumbled the moment she left it. Just a dream-thing, after all. She yawned, perfect and innocent, unaware of the chaos she'd woven and unwoven.
That night, as the glade settled back into its gentle glow, Ashara woke properly. Her silver eyes found mine with that unsettling focus, and she spoke with careful precision:
"Mama, I saw you be someone else. I didn't like her." A pause, tiny fingers clutching at my shirt. "But I think she loved you anyway."
My heart ached at the complexity of that understanding—that even our worst selves could carry love, that cruelty and care could exist in the same soul. I pressed her close, breathing in her scent of milk and moonlight and infinite possibility.
"Sleep, little dreamer," I whispered. "There's time enough for all the truths. Tonight, just be my daughter."
Outside the glade, something howled—long and low, a cry of something ancient learning how to dream. The sound should have frightened me.
Instead, I sang our lullaby, and let my daughter's breathing guide the rhythm.
Tomorrow, we'd face whatever her dreams had awakened.
Tonight, we were just mother and child, wrapped in boundaries of love and careful choice.
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