I always thought death would come quietly.
I was wrong. It came in color—orange and gold, the crackle of timber, the taste of smoke.
The night I died, the rain had stopped just long enough to let the fire breathe. I remember the sirens, the shouting, the sharp sting of heat against my skin. I remember the photograph on the wall melting before my eyes—our family frozen in time while everything around us burned.
Someone screamed my name. I don't know if it was me or her.
Mara.
Her voice carried through the smoke like a thread of silver. I reached for it, for her, for the only thing that had ever felt steady in this breaking world. Then the ceiling gave way, and the world went black.
⸻
When I opened my eyes, the ceiling was white. Not black with soot—white. The air smelled of roses and detergent, not smoke. I was lying in a bed I didn't know, wrapped in sheets that didn't belong to me.
A calendar on the wall said five years earlier.
My pulse stuttered.
I stumbled to the mirror across the room and froze. The reflection wasn't mine. The face staring back was younger, softer, unfamiliar. But the eyes—those were mine. They held the same flicker of fear, the same memory of fire.
"What is this?" I whispered. The woman in the mirror didn't answer.
Downstairs, voices. Laughter. A man calling someone's name. I followed the sound, my bare feet cold against the polished floor. The house was alive—photographs of strangers, the smell of coffee, a light humming from the kitchen.
And then I saw her.
She stood by the window, sunlight tracing the curve of her shoulder. She laughed at something my new brother said—my brother, the word tasted strange—and the sound sent a shiver through me.
Mara.
Not burnt, not broken, not gone. Alive. Whole. Wearing a ring that caught the morning light.
She turned, and for one impossible moment our eyes met. There it was again—that flicker of recognition, that pulse beneath the ribs. Then she smiled, polite and distant, the way strangers do.
"Hi," she said. "You must be Ayla."
The universe laughed.
I had been reborn into another life, another home, another family. But the fire still burned behind my eyes.
And the woman who once tried to save me now belonged to someone else.