The humming started just past midnight, seeping into my dreams like water through stone. At first, I thought it was memory—another echo of the lullaby I'd sung through every trial. But as consciousness pulled me from sleep, I realized the melody was wrong.
Not wrong. Different. Older.
Ashara lay between us, silver eyes closed, rosebud lips parted as sound emerged that no infant throat should know how to shape. The notes climbed and fell in patterns that predated human music, intervals that made my bones ache with recognition I couldn't name.
"Dorian." I kept my voice low, not wanting to wake her. "Listen."
He was already sitting up, face pale in the dying firelight. "I know that song."
The fire flickered—not dimming but reversing, flames bending backward against nature before snapping upright again. A stone near the hearth cracked with a sound like breaking hearts, and I tasted copper on the air.
"What is it?" I gathered Ashara closer, but she didn't stir. The humming continued, each note hanging too long in the air before dissolving.
"The Sarum Moriendo." His voice came out rough. "The royal death-song. My grandmother used to whisper about it—how the old kings would sing it as they died, passing their essence to their heirs. The Moon Temple banned it three generations ago."
"Why?"
"Because it didn't just pass power." He met my eyes, and I saw real fear there. "It passed everything. Memory. Madness. The weight of every choice, every kill, every moment of divine touch. The heirs would wake speaking in their fathers' voices, carrying grudges from wars that ended before their birth."
The melody shifted, and with it came pressure—not physical but deeper. Legacy pressing against the boundaries of my daughter's newly-formed self, trying to pour itself into spaces that should have been hers alone to fill.
"This isn't possession," I said, understanding cold in my chest. "It's inheritance."
"The bloodline remembering itself through her." Dorian's hand found his blade, though steel would be useless here. "But she's not royal blood. Not from any line that—"
"Velara was."
The name hung between us like a blade. Velara, who I'd been in another timeline. Who'd commanded legions and broken reality rather than bend. Whose echo had tried to claim Ashara before I'd severed that connection.
Or thought I had.
"The blood remembers," I whispered. "Even if the soul forgets. And she's mine, which means somewhere in her veins runs the potential for—"
Ashara's humming crescendoed, and the fire died entirely. In the darkness, her skin gave off the faintest luminescence—not divine light but something organic. Bloodglow. The visual manifestation of lineage asserting itself.
"There's a rite," Dorian said carefully. "Old magic, older than the temples. It can seal bloodline memories, lock them away where they can't surface. But—"
"But?"
"It requires binding her true name in silence. She'd never be able to speak it, hear it, know it fully. Part of her would always be... muted."
My arms tightened around her instinctively. After everything we'd fought to let her choose her own shape, the thought of sealing part of her away felt like another kind of violence. But the alternative—letting ancient legacy pour uncontrolled through her developing mind—
"What happens if we don't?" I asked.
"Then she sings. And things that have slept since Velara's fall will hear her. Will know the bloodline continues. Will come to claim or kill what they think belongs to them."
As if in answer, something howled in the distance. Not wolf—I knew that sound too well. Not human either. This was older, carrying harmonics that matched the death-song still humming from my daughter's lips. It echoed through the trees with the patience of something that had waited generations for this exact moment.
"It already knows," I said.
"One knows. If we don't act, more will come." Dorian relit the fire with shaking hands. "Aria, we need to decide. Seal her legacy and protect her from what hunts bloodlines, or—"
"Or let her sing." The words came out steady despite my terror. "Let her be complete, even if complete is dangerous."
"You can't be serious."
"I'm tired of cutting pieces off her to keep the world comfortable." I looked down at Ashara, still humming that ancient melody, still glowing with inherited light. "We've sealed gods, severed echoes, refused prophecies. Maybe it's time to stop taking things away and start teaching her to handle what she carries."
Another howl, closer now. Whatever remembered Velara's reign was moving through the forest with purpose.
"Then we run," Dorian said. "We take her somewhere the old bloodlines don't reach. Somewhere—"
"Everywhere reaches everywhere when it comes to blood." I stood, cradling Ashara as her death-song finally faded to silence. "We don't run. We prepare. We teach her that legacy isn't destiny, that blood isn't binding."
"And if what comes for her is stronger than we are?"
I thought of the thing howling in the darkness—patient, ancient, carrying grudges older than memory. Of the royal blood asserting itself in my daughter's veins despite never being formally passed. Of all the ways inheritance could twist a child into shapes they never chose.
"Then we fight. Like we always have. Like we always will." I met his eyes. "She deserves to be whole, even if whole is harder. Even if whole is hunted."
He nodded slowly, understanding if not agreeing. Together, we began to pack by firelight, preparing for flight not from what Ashara was becoming but toward somewhere we could help her become it safely.
Outside, the howling stopped. Worse than the sound was the silence that followed—the careful quiet of something that had found what it sought and was deciding how best to claim it.
But Ashara slept on, peaceful now, the bloodglow faded back to normal infant skin. Whatever had woken in her had settled, content for now to wait. To grow. To remember itself slowly rather than all at once.
I pressed a kiss to her forehead, tasting legacy on her skin like salt from ancient tears.
"Sing if you need to," I whispered. "We'll handle what hears you."
The night pressed close, full of watchers and waiters and things that remembered when Velara's name meant blood.
But we would face them as we'd faced everything else—together, defiant, refusing to apologize for the crime of existing complete.
The bloodline could wake.
We'd make sure it woke on our terms.
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