The woods beyond Synnex where I had once tumbled from the cliffs, the mist closing around me. The same skeletal trees bentbeneath frost, their branches bowing under the weight of snow and ice.
At the edge of the clearing, a woman waited with her back to me.
Her gown drifted like twilight spun into smoke, its hem trailing across the snow without ever touching it. Her hair—black as the night we stood in—shifted, though no wind stirred.
I did not know her name. But I knew her. The way a child knows the dark.
She did not turn when she spoke.
“They buried you in names that were not yours.”
Her voice was quiet. Not gentle. Quiet the way a blade rests against a throat.
“They tried to sever you from what you were becoming. Thought if they carved deep enough, bled you long enough, they could unmake the thread the old gods wove.”
She paused. Her hands remained at her sides, but the air around her vibrated—like the hum of a string pulled too tight, nearly past hearing.
“And still,”she murmured,“you rose.”
I didn’t answer. My voice had no place here. My throat ached with words I could not speak.
She turned. Where her face should have been, there was a void. A hollow so profound it felt deliberate.
Only her eyes remained.
Two dying stars, rimmed in grief. They fixed on me, and I could not look away.
“They feared what would rise from the ashes of what they destroyed,” she said. “So they marked you in the name of silence. But silence…”
She stepped forward, and the ground seemed to shudder with her.
“…silence has never stopped a storm. It only delays its breaking.”
A pulse stirred beneath my skin, low and slow. A second heartbeat, buried under the first. It echoed through the scar across my chest, through every place I’d tried to forget.
Her hand lifted. Cold—not lifeless, but the cold of deep water, of stone that remembers winter. Her fingers brushed my face, then traced the scar from brow to chest, across the place my heart had nearly ceased the night they marked me.
Where her touch passed, the scar pulsed gold.
“You were not made to be buried,” she said. “You were made to remember. To carry the echo forward.”
Her gaze never faltered.
“What they did was meant to bind you. To keep your blood from calling the old names. But it is calling now.”
My hands trembled.
She leaned closer, her voice dropping to a whisper carved from marrow. “Tell me, daughter of dusk… do you remember whose shadow you carry?”
The ground cracked. Split like a wound.
I fell.
Through sky, through shadow, my own memories flashing in my peripheral. And then?—
Warmth.
Hayat’s laughter rang just behind me. I would know that laugh anywhere.