The night passed in uneasy silence.
The trees whispered, but not in words. The air trembled with old breath — like the forest was sighing beneath the weight of too many things that had happen. Lyra slept curled beneath the twisted roots of an ancient tree, wrapped in her arms, her head resting on moss that felt too soft, too warm, like it remembered the shape of other bodies before hers.
She didn't dream at first.
Not in the way dreams normally came.
But somewhere in the slow drift between sleep and waking, the veil shifted.
It began with a sound — not a voice, not quite. A murmur. Then a flicker of images. Flashes of places she didn't recognize: a city carved into the cliffs of a crimson sea, a tower split open by lightning, a pair of hands outstretched to the stars. She saw herself — or someone who looked like her — standing before a throne made of bone and flame, speaking a name that cracked the sky.
Then came the voices.
Not one.
Many.
Hundreds, layered over each other. All familiar. All wrong.
"You promised us."
"She betrayed them for us."
"We were gods once."
"No… no, we were only a girl."
"Do you remember the fire?"
"Do you remember the silence after?"
Each voice echoed in her bones, not her ears. She turned — in the dream, or in her mind — and saw herself reflected in shards of broken glass. In each shard, a different Lyra stared back. Some older. Some younger. Some cloaked in crowns and battle-scarred armor, others in tattered robes or blood-stained hands.
They all spoke at once.
"Who are you now?"
"Who will you be?"
"What do you choose?"
She wanted to scream. To silence them. To run.
But her body refused to move.
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The images shifted. A battlefield beneath two suns. A cavern where stars dripped from the ceiling like water. A boy with silver eyes whispering her name before fading into smoke. A woman dressed in black and gold standing in front of a gate with no hinges, smiling with grief.
Then — stillness.
And a single voice, soft and slow, emerged from the chaos.
"You've walked many threads," it said. "Not all of them led home."
Lyra's breath hitched. Her chest burned. She didn't know if she was asleep anymore. The forest felt like it was inside her head — or she had fallen into the forest's dream.
The voice continued.
"But each time, you chose the same choice."
"What did I choose?" she asked, her voice barely more than a breath.
Silence again. Then:
"To fall and sacrificed."
The images shattered. The glass broke. The echo collapsed.
And Lyra woke up.
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The moss beneath her was damp. Cold air clung to her skin. Morning had not yet broken, but the sky had begun to pale, casting a soft gray glow through the trees.
She sat up slowly, breathing profusely.
Her hands were shaking.
She pressed her palms to her face and sat there, trying to remember what she had seen. What she had heard. But the fragments slipped away like sand through a sieve.
Only the weight remained.
Something heavy. Something ancient. A sense of having looked through a keyhole into another version of herself — one she didn't understand. One that frightened her.
"Was that… real?" she whispered.
"Yes," Noxy said softly.
Lyra's head turned sharply. "You were there."
"I always am. Especially when you dream."
She didn't know what to say to that.
"You saw the echoes," Noxy continued. "Fragments of lives you've lived before. Reflections of choices made across time."
"They didn't feel like me," Lyra said. "Or… they did. But they weren't. Some of them were cruel. Some were kind. One of them was laughing as the world burned. One was crying alone in a temple made of mirrors."
"They are all you. But they are not who you are now."
"Then what am I?"
"That," Noxy said gently, "is something only you can decide."
Lyra stood. Her legs felt numb, her feet chilled from the ground. She rubbed warmth back into them and looked toward the east, where faint light was beginning to break through the mist.
"I don't want to become the one who laughed," she said after a while.
"You won't," Noxy replied. "Not if you choose differently."
"And what if I don't know how?"
"Then you learn slowly. And I'll always help you."
She picked up a small stick and traced a line in the dirt. Then another. She drew a circle around it, absent-minded.
"What were they talking about?" she asked. "The thread. The falling. Why do they keep saying I chose to fall?"
Noxy didn't answer at first.
When she finally spoke, her voice was softer than ever.
"Because you did. To protect what mattered. To seal what was breaking. But falling has consequences."
"And that's the reason why I don't remember anything?"
"Yes."
"Will I remember eventually?"
"You'll remember pieces by pieces slowly. Enough to move forward. But not all at once. Your soul remembers more than your mind can carry."
Lyra stared at her drawing. The lines didn't mean anything. Not yet. But they felt familiar — like something ancient had guided her fingers.
"I saw a woman," she murmured. "Dressed in black and gold. She looked like she was mourning. But also like she'd already lost everything she loved."
Noxy was silent for a long time.
"She was one of the few who never forgot about you," she said at last.
Lyra's chest ached.
She wiped her eyes before tears could fall.
"I want to move forward," she whispered.
"Then take the next step."
So she did.
She gathered what little she had: a flask of water, a scrap of cloth she'd tied into a pouch with wild berries that Noxy had deemed safe, and a makeshift walking stick carved from a fallen branch.
The forest path before her wasn't clear — but she didn't need it to be. It was enough to know it led somewhere.
She walked.
And as she walked, she felt echoes all around her. In the rustle of the leaves. In the hush of the wind. In the gentle way sunlight filtered through the trees.
Sometimes she saw things in the corner of her eye: a girl with silver hair walking beside her, a shadow that didn't match the shape of her body, footsteps that fell when she wasn't moving.
She didn't run from them.
She let them walk beside her, even if she didn't understand them yet.
The echoes weren't memories.
Not really.
They were pieces of a song she hadn't yet remembered how to sing.
But she would. Eventually
And when she did, the world would remember about her too.
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Far behind her, the tree she had slept beneath stirred in the wind.
Its roots tightened.
And somewhere in the hidden hollow of its trunk, a flicker of silver light pulsed — as if something ancient had awakened.
Watching.
Waiting.
Remembering.