I remember running.
The thought surfaced from somewhere I couldn't name. Not my voice. Not quite. Something older. Something that tasted like extinct flowers and vast wings and love so consuming it felt like drowning.
I sat surrounded by forbidden texts in an archive I should never have entered, tears drying on my cheeks, and felt the weight of ten thousand years pressing down on my shoulders.
Who was I?
Who had I been?
The questions hung in the ancient air, unanswered.
I should have left.
Ancient grief. Borrowed memories. A story that felt too close to my own skin for comfort. I should have walked back through the narrow corridors, found my way to the nursery, wrapped myself in the weighted blanket and waited for Morgrith to return and explain what any of it meant.
But the pull was irresistible.
A smaller chamber opened off the main archives—barely visible, hidden behind shelves that seemed to part at my approach. The shadows here were different. Reverential. They curled back from the doorway as if giving me space to enter something sacred.
I entered anyway.
The portrait hung on the far wall, preserved by magic that had kept it pristine for ten millennia. The frame was simple—dark wood, unadorned—but the image itself glowed with pigments that no longer existed. Colors that had been extinct for longer than human civilization had stood. Whites that seemed to emanate light. Golds that shifted when I looked at them. And her face—
Her face stopped my breath.
Dark honey hair that fell past her shoulders in waves. A practical hairstyle, I thought distantly. The kind a working woman would choose. Healer's hands resting at her sides, clean and capable, the hands of someone who had spent her life reaching toward other people's pain.
And her eyes.
Pale grey with an unusual luminescence.
Eyes that seemed to look through the portrait and into me, seeing everything I was, everything I'd been, everything I might become.
I stepped closer.
The features weren't exactly mine. I studied them with a healer's attention to detail—the nose was straighter than mine, the cheekbones higher, the jaw more defined. Centuries of bloodlines had changed things. Softened some angles, sharpened others. We were not twins.
But we were something.
The shape of the jaw. The way the hair fell. The exact shade of those luminous grey eyes, unusual enough that I'd never met anyone else who shared them. Close enough that looking at her felt like looking into a mirror that showed a different life.
And there—
Barely visible—
A thin scar above the left eyebrow.
My hand rose to my own face without conscious decision.
I traced the line I'd carried since childhood. An accident, my grandmother had told me. You fell when you were three and hit your head on a stone. Nothing remarkable. Nothing worth questioning.
The same scar.
The same placement.
The exact same shape.
I stared at the portrait and the portrait stared back, and something cracked open inside me that had been sealed for twenty-seven years. Longer. Ten thousand years, maybe, locked away and waiting for this moment.