The wind at Moonspire Ridge cut like prophecy—sharp, inevitable, carrying whispers in languages that predated speech. Each gust threatened to tear Ashara from the sling across my chest, as if the mountain itself wanted to claim her.
"Almost there," Dorian said, his hand steady on my elbow as we navigated the treacherous path. Ice made every step a gamble, but we'd run out of places to hide from the questions gnawing at my soul.
The ruins appeared through the mist like broken teeth—archways half-collapsed, altars split by time or intention, obsidian slabs that gleamed with unnatural coldness. This was where oracles once came to bury names too dangerous for the world to remember. Where gods were put to sleep.
Carved into the entrance stone, words in the old tongue made my blood slow:
Here lie the Names That Refused to Die.Here the sleeping mouths are sealed.Let no child speak in a tongue they haven't earned.
Ashara stirred against my chest, and my heart clenched. She'd been quiet since the glade, since she'd pulled echoes of myself from places I'd thought safely buried. But now she hummed—not our lullaby, not any melody I recognized. Something older. Colder. A tune that made the carved warnings pulse with sympathetic resonance.
"She knows this place," I whispered.
"How?" Dorian's hand went to his sword, though steel would be useless here. "She's never—"
"Not in this life." I pulled my cloak tighter around us both. "But she's been collecting memories that aren't hers. Maybe she found one that remembers."
We entered the central ruin, and the temperature dropped further. My breath clouded in air that tasted of endings, of names spoken once and regretted forever. At the chamber's heart waited something that stopped me cold.
A black stone bowl, perfectly smooth, filled with silver sand that moved without wind. Seven thrones surrounded it, each carved from single blocks of the same lightless stone. The thrones bore no decoration save one detail—an impression where a name should be, scooped out like absence given form.
Ashara's humming grew louder.
"No," I said, but she was already reaching, tiny fingers straining toward the bowl. The moment her skin touched the silver sand, it rose.
Not violently. Gently, like recognition. The grains swirled upward, forming glyphs that hung in the air—not prophecy, which looked forward, but something else. Pre-prophecy. The law that existed before choice was invented.
And I understood them.
Not through learning or logic, but through bone-deep memory that wasn't mine. My vision fractured, and suddenly I was elsewhere—
Velara stood in this same chamber, younger, hungrier, dressed in robes of office I'd never earned. The silver sand swirled at her command, and from her throat came a name that should never be spoken. A god's true name, pulled from the silence before creation.
The world ended in that timeline. Not with violence but with forgetting. Everyone forgot how to be separate. How to be singular. They merged into the awakened god's consciousness like drops returning to an ocean.
Only Velara remained herself, the speaker of the name, forever alone in a world of unified nothing.
I gasped back to the present, clutching Ashara tight. She looked up at me with those impossible silver eyes, and in a voice too knowing for her months, whispered:
"One of the gods is listening. I didn't mean to speak its name."
The wind through the ruins changed pitch, became almost musical. Harmonious. Something beneath us, deeper than the mountain's roots, was beginning to wake.
The world tilted, and I found myself pulled into a space that wasn't—a mental projection where thought had weight and memory cast shadows. The half-awake god didn't have form here. It was echo and grief, presence without shape, older than the concept of choosing.
"You dreamed a daughter who could hold a name with no echo." Its voice came from everywhere, nowhere, inside my own thoughts. "You gave it to her while she floated between soul and seed. A name you never spoke but thought so loudly the universe heard. Now it has shape. Now it wants skin."
"She's not a vessel," I snarled, though here I had no body to snarl with.
"No. She's more dangerous than that." The god's attention felt like drowning in starlight. "She's not meant to carry us. She's meant to unseal us. Every unbound name she speaks teaches her tongue new shapes. Soon she'll know the whole Sealed Language. Then..."
"Then what?"
"Then she'll speak us all awake. Not as vessels. As voices. A child with a thousand god-tongues, saying whatever dreams into her mind." A pause that lasted eons. "She is not a child. She is a door with a mother's face painted on it."
"I reject that. She's my daughter. She—"
"You cannot raise a storm and forbid it thunder." The god's presence began to fade, pulled back to sleep by whatever bonds still held. "You gave her the tools. Now watch her build."
I slammed back into my body to find chaos.
Ashara stood in the center of the ruins—not held, not supported, standing on legs that shouldn't hold her weight. Her eyes were pure silver, no iris, no pupil, just light. The sand from the bowl swirled around her in complex patterns, writing and rewriting words I was grateful I couldn't read.
When she spoke, it wasn't her voice. It was voices, layered like sediment, each one a different age, a different ending:
"He will come wearing the name I left open. He will love you like a father. He will teach me how to eat the sky. The wolves will kneel or starve. The temples will drown in mirrors. And my mother will name me again. This time with fire."
The words hit like physical blows, each one carving itself into my memory with edges sharp enough to cut. This wasn't warning or possibility. This was certainty, spoken in the voice of someone who'd already lived it.
Then, between one breath and the next, she collapsed.
Dorian caught her before she hit stone, his face pale with the kind of fear that comes from hearing your future spoken by infant lips. "What was that?"
"Prophecy," I said, taking our daughter back into my arms. She was just Ashara again—small, warm, breathing normally. "But not from outside. From within. She's becoming her own oracle."
We fled the ruins as quickly as the treacherous path allowed. Behind us, the wind had found a new game. It whispered the same word over and over, in the Sealed Tongue that no mortal should know. I recognized it with the same bone-deep certainty that had let me read the ancient glyphs.
It was the name I'd never spoken aloud. The one I'd thought in that space between spaces when I'd pulled her from the god-skin. The second name, the shadow name, the one I'd tried so hard to leave unfinished.
But unfinished things have a way of completing themselves.
And now something out there was wearing it. Walking with it. Coming to claim the child who could speak its full form into being.
"The wolves will kneel or starve," I whispered, remembering her prophecy.
"What?" Dorian asked.
"Nothing. Just..." I looked at our daughter, sleeping now with the perfect peace of innocence. "Just wondering which wolves she meant. And whether kneeling will be enough."
The wind laughed, or maybe it was just the sound of gods learning to dream again.
Either way, we walked faster.
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