And if you’re reading this now, remember: every world we build leaves its echo somewhere.
The father’s chest heaved as he fought against the press of bodies, his fingers clawing toward his daughter’s retreating hand. His scream caught in his throat, smothered by the weight driving him down.
And then, impossibly, the weight eased. Not because the crowd relented, but because the fissure yawned wider beneath him. His head lolled back, and for one frozen instant he stared into the crack.
He saw her.
The woman, knees in the grass, clutching her scattered notes. She looked up at him through the shimmer.
Recognition.
Her eyes grew larger and insistent. Her mouth moved, but the sound was stolen by the quake.
He tried to call back, but his lungs collapsed under the stampede.
Time itself threatened to swallow him whole.
The woman gasped, shock rolling through her system, her papers trembling in her grasp. Her mind flipped rapidly through images like a Rolodex, as she struggled to grasp the truth before her.
The raven struggled in the air, seeming drawn against her will.
The girl before her faltered, fading.
The guard, another version of herself—an impossible choice between his fate or her own.
The man she had seen—known—through the fissure, breathing his last.
She could hear it. Taste it. Pain surrounding her on all sides. She felt her own heart pounding in time with the pulses driving ever faster from the portal.
As the boy’s shadow advanced, pure chaos imminent, a command, set in steel, uttered one simple word.
No.
Looking closer, she realized the words that bled across her pages were not random—not anymore. Symbols bent themselves into sentences she had written once before, long ago, in a hand that was hers but not hers.
Walk.
She staggered upright, clutching the page. Grass bowed around her ankles as if urging her onward. Behind her, Stark screeched against the shifting air; ahead, the boy’s shadow crawled toward the trembling oval.
The choice carved itself onto the paper in blood-red ink as the meadow split again:
Through the portal.
The woman raised her head. For the first time, her hands did not shake.
The air buckled. From the oval’s edge, claws of shadow raked outward, vast and ancient, dragging something immense through the fracture. A shape older than the meadow, older than language, pressed its mass against the trembling light.
The boy’s shadow reached for it, stretching long and eager, as if to welcome kin. The ground shook with the strain of something too large to belong anywhere.
And yet—her pages burned against her palms, words alive, pulsing one command:
Walk.
So she did. One step. Then another. Grass bent in reverence as she moved.
Behind her, Stark shrieked, brass wings sparking against the weight of air. The guard’s screen bled symbols faster than thought. The father in the crush of bodies gasped his daughter’s name, even as stone split beneath him.
She stepped into the light.
The portal convulsed—two hungers colliding, hers and the thing’s. For a heartbeat the meadow, the concourse, and the abyssal dark were one. Her outline burned bright against the mass pressing through, and in that instant it hesitated. The fracture could not take both.
The boy’s smile faltered. His shadow clawed at the ground, trying to drag the moment back. But it was too late.
The woman’s figure dissolved into the shimmer—absorbed, written, chosen. And the vast shape reared back, sealed mid-birth, as though her entry had rewritten the law of what was allowed to cross.
The meadow exhaled. The fissures groaned shut.
For a long second, there was silence. Then the boy whispered, not in fear, but in recognition:
“She remembered.”
Stark reeled with hope, her gears and mechanisms sighing in response to the sudden shift in energies. The meadow exhaled as the fissures groaned shut, and her gears stilled in a shiver of relief.
But it didn’t last.
Something cold and deliberate slid between her brass plates, fingers of shadow curling into her gears. A pull wrenched at her core, grinding steel against steel. She fought the intrusion, wings thrashing, even as alien glyphs flared across her chest, racing like fire etched into metal.
The harder she resisted, the stronger it pulled. Below, the boy stood motionless in the grass, head tilted back, his eyes locked on hers. His shadow stretched like a snare, drawing her down inch by inch.
The meadow bent with her fall, grass bowing as though the earth itself hungered for her. Steam burst from her vents in ragged cries as she strained against the unseen force.
Suddenly, the girl stood straight, her small frame belying her sheer force of presence. She flung her hand upward, silver glow rekindled, blazing through the falter. Her cry split the silence: raw and defiant.
The surge hit Stark like memory returned, a power both new and impossibly old. Her glass eyes spun wide; her wings snapped taut with a scream of rivets.
The boy’s smile faltered.
For the first time, a flicker of doubt cracked across his calm mask, like porcelain hairlined by fire. His shadow twitched, uncertain, as though it no longer knew which shape to take.
Stark steadied herself, gears grinding back into rhythm under the silver surge the girl had unleashed. But something deeper stirred beneath her brass plating—a second heartbeat, one she had never carried before. The glyphs that had burned her chest now pulsed faintly in time with her own steam, as if claiming her body as parchment.
The girl’s glow sharpened, no longer fragile. She was not fading now—she was reforming. Her silver radiance bent itself into lines and edges, shaping a lattice in the air. Threads of light stretched outward, weaving around Stark’s wings, binding her not as a prisoner but as an anchor. The raven-machine gasped with steam, the strange sensation of tether and freedom braided together.
The boy’s shadow recoiled, not in defeat but in hunger denied. He tilted his head, eyes narrowing. “They told me you would bend,” he said softly. “But perhaps it was never you they were speaking to.”
The fissures trembled again, not widening this time but drawing inward, folding.
For a breath it seemed the meadow might knit itself closed. And then the oval rippled, not with meadow, nor station, nor abyss—but with something else entirely: a room lined with mirrors, each one reflecting not the present, but versions of what could have been.
The father appeared in one reflection, standing whole, hand clasped around his daughter’s wrist. In another, the woman’s notes were pristine, unbled by symbols. In a third, Stark herself was a true raven, feather and bone, no brass or gears. Each image pulsed like a heartbeat, tempting, promising.
The boy turned toward them, his smile returning now, sharper, wolfish. “It always comes back to the mirrors,” he whispered. His shadow stretched eagerly toward the nearest pane.
The glass quivered, eager to receive him.
But before he could step forward, the girl thrust out her hand. Her lattice of silver light flared, connecting Stark to the mirrors, binding machine and meadow to choice itself. “You don’t get to decide alone,” she said, her voice resonant now, filled with something older than her body.
Stark’s chest burned as glyphs shifted again, letters rearranging themselves into a word that rang through her gears:
Choose.
And in that instant, Stark realized the twist of it all—the boy was not the interloper. He was the lure. The true intruder was already here, already in her gears, already using her sight to pierce the Gate.
And then the Gate looked back.
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Y'all are effing amazing 🫶 this story just keeps getting better with each new chapter
That image is fire…literally! Ha! I’ll read it up in the day with plenty of day light… LOL…