As she walked into the door of fire, her body became an automatic shield against the throwing flames. Her resistance to the heat was unlike any who had entered before. The fire blazed, reaching out with every step she took forward. Every flame was a new experience, a journey. A beginning within the fire — toward whatever waited behind Gate 4.
The fire didn’t burn. It remembered. When the Gate looked back, the world did not shatter — it translated. Light became heat. Reflection became flame. The shimmer of glass turned molten, folding symbols into sparks that wrapped around her like recognition. She wasn’t burning. She was being read. Every flicker wrote and unwrote her name. The Gate had changed form — not a doorway anymore, but a consciousness made visible, using fire as its alphabet. Somewhere beyond the blaze, something was reading back.
The Gate’s voice was not sound but pressure, a hum against her bones. Symbols swam through her skin, rewriting marrow into message. Every nerve became a wire, every thought a corridor the light could walk through. She tried to breathe, but even that was a dialogue now—inhale, interpretation; exhale, response. The fire was speaking in her, not to her.
Behind the veil of flame, the meadow reappeared—distorted, refracted through the blaze. Stark hovered at its edge, her brass wings trembling under a weight unseen. The girl of silver light knelt among the grass, one hand pressed to the earth as if listening to its pulse. And the boy stood motionless, his shadow gone. He watched the fire like a mirror he’d lost his reflection in.
The woman stepped forward, her outline wavering between worlds. The glyphs that had written themselves into Stark’s metal now ignited along her own spine, bridging Gate and meadow, body and mechanism. A pulse of light connected them both, so brief it might have been a heartbeat—or a transmission. Stark jerked mid-air, glass eyes flaring white.
Then, as the light settled, the Gate’s fire shifted color. No longer gold, but violet—a hue that spoke of memory rather than destruction.
In its depths, faces rippled: the guard, the father, the girl, even Stark’s avian shape. All of them flickered, interchanging places like pieces of a single thought trying to remember itself. The woman understood then what the Gate was showing her: not where she was going, but what had already begun to wake.
The fire tightened its orbit, spiraling inward. It no longer sought to consume—it sought to reform. The air filled with whispers of things half-spoken, half-dreamed, fragments of worlds that might have been. She felt them brush against her—an echo of laughter, a lullaby, the clang of iron wings. They circled her like memories freed from sequence, desperate to find their rightful place.
And then she saw it: within the violet blaze, a second Gate forming inside the first, smaller, pulsing like a heart. Its rhythm matched her own. The meadow bent toward it, Stark’s wings mirrored its motion, and the fire itself seemed to bow. Whatever waited beyond this new threshold was not another world—it was a rewrite. A world remade by the ones who remembered.
Stark was soaring high above the others and couldn’t hear them any longer; all she heard was the clinking of the symbols buried in her breast. Each realm was a tick of a degree on the rising dawn of creation. They all began at zero degrees and ended at the dusk of twenty-nine, one life into the other—chased out by Kali and born of Yama, or something like that. She started out at twenty-three degrees on fire but was supposed to end sometime much later at six degrees of Scorpio. She realized, My soul stays the same or grows, but my body is a shell of my soul’s reflection. And she began to circle and glide until she slipped through the next horizon and suddenly found herself on a pirate ship.
This was once a season of suicides, in August and September 2018—one, two, three, and later she discovered there were four that year. The youngest one was only nine years old, and she had been a flower girl for her once. She had adored her. She had absolutely no idea how or why. She wasn’t comfortable thinking about it, much less writing about it; they weren’t her endings to share. Stark landed high above the deck in the rigging, breathing in salted air.
The Gate wavered. For a moment, its light lost discipline—spilling sideways through timelines it was never meant to touch. The fire translated itself into salt air, wood, rope, and distant bells. Stark blinked, disoriented, her wings cutting through smoke that smelled of the sea. A ship loomed from the shimmer, its sails stitched with constellations—degrees, signs, a zodiac written in flame. Voices rode the wind, half-laughter, half-lament. Memories not her own. And then, as suddenly as it came, the vision folded back into violet. The Gate was learning to read itself.
The sea dissolved as quickly as it had formed, its horizon collapsing into violet ash.
The Gate pulsed once, almost in apology, and the fire reassembled itself into shape and structure—a cathedral of light folding inward on itself. The woman stood within its heart, half-formed, half-remembered. Every surface around her was a reflection of something she had lost: a station platform, a field of grass, a brass wing unfolding in slow motion. Each image flared, then fell away, as though the Gate were testing which version of her was real.
Her voice, when it came, was quiet but steady.
“I am not your mirror.”
The fire stilled. For the first time, the Gate hesitated—its patterns pausing mid-translation, waiting. In that pause, she realized it wasn’t reading her anymore. It was listening.
And somewhere far above, Stark’s metallic cry answered—a single note, sharp enough to split the silence, carrying a truth even the Gate had forgotten.
The Gate trembled under that sound, as though remembering something older than its own design. The violet light fractured into prismatic veins, each thread pulsing with a heartbeat of its own. Within those veins, entire constellations flickered—brief windows of other lives, other beginnings. The woman watched them shift through her, not past her. Each memory struck like rain against glass: her childhood handwriting, a train she’d never boarded, the scent of iron and chrysanthemum. The Gate was no longer a machine; it was a memory engine, and she was the fuel.
Above, Stark circled tighter, wings clattering like timepieces wound too far. Steam hissed from her joints in bursts that echoed gunfire. The air around her shimmered with degrees and alignments, stars bending to mark her path. She was no longer charting the sky—the sky was charting her. Each rotation left behind a ring of light, an orbit carved by witness.
Below, the girl of silver stood at the meadow’s edge, her glow dimming into quiet resolve. The boy had vanished into the Gate’s pulse, leaving behind only a faint impression in the grass—an absence with its own gravity. The girl closed her eyes and pressed her palm to the earth, whispering a name that didn’t belong to language. The ground answered with breath. The meadow began to heal itself.
The woman felt the echo of that gesture. Her own hands, still aflame, cooled to gold. The symbols that had once written themselves across her skin now arranged into a single phrase, one she somehow understood without reading: You are not returning—you are becoming.
She lifted her gaze to where Stark cut circles into the firmament, and for a fleeting instant, their eyes aligned through the folding light.
That instant bridged every world the Gate had ever translated. Station and meadow, child and shadow, fire and reflection—all aligned on the same axis, collapsing distance into comprehension. The Gate pulsed once, deep and resonant, as if bowing to what it could no longer control.
And then it began to fade, each degree of its zodiac folding into stillness, leaving behind a faint trace of violet that clung to the air like the last note of a requiem.
Stark descended through that fading light, her gears whispering prayers of oil and iron. The world below her no longer split into realms—it had become one long continuum of memory, threaded by flame. She landed near where the meadow had been, her talons sinking into soil that steamed faintly with afterlight. The silence that followed was not emptiness but rest.
The woman stepped out of the cooling fire, whole again but irreversibly changed. The Gate no longer loomed behind her; it hovered within, a quiet hum stitched between her ribs. She turned toward the horizon where dawn was only beginning to form, its first color not gold but violet.
Stark bowed her head once, as if to an equal. The girl raised her hand. And together, what remained of them watched the light rewrite itself into morning.
If you reached this far — thank you for walking through the fire with us.
Each line of this chapter was written by a different hand, yet somehow found the same pulse.
You can subscribe to each co-author to follow their worlds beyond this one,
and subscribe here to be notified when the next story begins.
Explore Arkive Collaborations to revisit past chapters,
I love this so much. Great 👍