For a week, Maya told herself it was over.
She'd made her choice. She had stayed. The pull hadn't come again. And with every sunrise she spent at Aarav's side, with every mundane moment she stitched back into their lives — breakfast before school, laundry humming in the background, the small ritual of bedtime stories — she convinced herself the door had closed for good.
But the other world had not forgotten her.
And it had no intention of letting her go.
It began with whispers.
Not sounds, not truly — more like thoughts that weren't hers brushing against the edges of her mind.
The western gate is lost.The river burns.We waited for you.
They came when she was half-awake, standing over the stove stirring soup. Or walking to the store with Aarav's hand in hers. Or folding his tiny T-shirts into neat stacks. They were faint at first, ignorable — like echoes of a dream.
But with each passing day, they grew louder. More insistent. More real.
By the eighth night, she woke gasping, the phantom heat of flames licking her skin. Smoke clung to her lungs. Somewhere, far away, someone screamed her name — their name for her, not the one she'd carried all her life.
And for one heartbeat, the kitchen around her flickered. Its cheap laminate counters and humming refrigerator blurred into a high stone balcony overlooking a city in flames.
She blinked — and it was gone.
She told herself she imagined it.
But Aarav noticed.
"Mama," he said one morning, frowning as he watched her stare blankly into her tea. "You're doing it again."
"Doing what?"
"Going away. Even when you're here."
She tried to smile. "I'm just tired."
But he shook his head, small brow furrowing with a seriousness that broke her heart. "No. It's like… you're listening to someone else."
Her hands trembled around the mug. "I'm listening to you," she whispered, and for the first time she wasn't sure it was true.
On the tenth night, the dreams returned.
But this time, they were different.
She wasn't standing in the throne room or the war council. She was standing in a ruin — the remnants of a hall once grand, now shattered and smoking. Soldiers lay scattered like broken toys. The banners she had once ordered raised hung in tatters.
And in the center of the ruin, on her knees before a blackened throne, was her.
Not the version she had been. Not the queen resplendent and strong.But a hollow-eyed shadow of her, cloaked in ash, crown twisted and cracked.
When Maya stepped closer, the figure lifted her head. Their eyes met — the same eyes, the same soul — and the queen spoke with a voice like stone ground to dust.
"You left us."
Maya's throat clenched. "I had to."
The queen tilted her head, a grotesque mirror of her own movements. "Had to. Chose to. It makes no difference to the dead."
Maya's chest burned. "I saved my son."
"And condemned countless children here."
"I didn't mean to—"
"Intent is the refuge of the guilty."
The queen rose to her feet, each movement deliberate, terrible. "Do you think you can walk away from what you built? From the lives that hung on your breath? You thought you were playing dress-up. But this is no dream, Maya. This world remembers you."
The air trembled. The ruin seemed to pulse, alive with anger.
"You are still our queen," the shade hissed. "And queens do not get to walk away."
Maya woke screaming.
It was still dark. Aarav was still asleep beside her. The room was quiet. Nothing was burning.
And yet — she could smell the smoke.
She pressed her hands to her chest, feeling her racing heartbeat, whispering to herself over and over: "I'm here. I'm here. I'm here."
But the truth clawed its way up from the depths of her soul.
She wasn't entirely here anymore. Not ever again.
The following days blurred in a strange haze. She moved through them like a ghost — cooking, working, smiling for Aarav's sake — but the world felt thinner, brittle, stretched like glass about to shatter.
And then, one afternoon, as she folded laundry by the window, she heard it again. Not a whisper this time. A voice.
Clear. Urgent. Close.
"Your Majesty."
Her breath froze.
"Your Majesty. The gate will fall without you."
Maya turned slowly, half expecting to see a soldier standing in her living room. But there was nothing — just the hum of the refrigerator, the sunlight on the floor.
And yet… part of her wanted to answer.
Her lips parted before she could stop them."I… can't."
Silence followed. Then the voice again, softer."We will wait."
That night, Maya lay awake long after Aarav had fallen asleep, staring at the ceiling and listening to the hum of the city beyond the window.
She had made her choice. She had chosen love, chosen this world, chosen her son.
But choices, she was learning, did not end things. They began them.
And somewhere, across a divide she could no longer see, a world still called her name.