“This isn’t real,” he said quietly.
A short, humorless sound escaped her before she could catch it.“That’s tremendously comforting, Shade.Really.I feel so much better knowing one of my worst transgressions and regrets is technically a fictional story for you to get to see.Love it when my shame is on display for all to see.Makes me all warm and fuzzy inside, like a damn cactus.”
The air pulsed once, slow and heavy, like a held breath reluctantly released.
The figure on the ground moved.
Just slightly, a small, involuntary shift, the kind of movement that happened before consciousness fully returned, but enough.
Myanin went still in the way statues were still.She had to remind herself to breathe and nearly gasped as she spoke.“No.”The word came out quieter this time, stripped of its performance.She took a single step backward before she caught herself.“That is not how this works.You don’t get to rewrite things.You don't get to?—”
The figure inhaled.
The sound was broken and ragged and terrible.
The bottom dropped out of Myanin’s stomach entirely.
“You let me die.”The voice that followed was wrong in the same way the echo’s smile was wrong, layered, two sounds pressed inside one another: one the thing she held in memory and one something older and colder living underneath it, wearing the familiar one like a coat.
Myanin shook her head, a sharp, involuntary motion, and hated herself for it.“No, I killed you.Don’t sugar coat it and try to get me to agree with you.I made the conscious decision to take your life.”
“And yet you still live,” the figure said.“You took my life but kept your own.Where is the justice in that?”
The flames surged outward with a sound like exhaling, close enough now that the heat became personal rather than ambient, specific and intentional against her forearms, her face, the exposed column of her throat.
“You, a warrior who had served the djinn well, turned on your own people.You ran from what you did as if you could outrun the memory that is no doubt burned into every cell in your brain.Perhaps the trauma you have is enough punishment, but then I remember I’m dead, and I’m like, nope, not enough.Not even close.”
Something in Myanin’s chest contracted hard and then refused to release.She drew a slow breath, counted the weight of it, pressed it out again as carefully as she’d gathered it, buying herself half a second of discipline.“I didn't—” The words caught somewhere between her throat and her mouth.Her jaw tightened.
Because something in the architecture of the memory had lodged itself in the truth, and she could feel it, not the shape the book had forced it into, not the neat, damning version laid out in front of her like an indictment, but something close enough to real that denying it entirely felt like lying.
She knew.
“It’s twisting it.”Shade’s voice sharpened, the quiet stripped away.“Every word it shows you is bent.Don’t engage with it.”
“Oh, I'm sorry,” Myanin said, eyes locked on the figure pushing itself upright from the blackened stone, arms trembling with the effort of it, “I’ll simply ignore the walking guilt trip and practice healthy emotional boundaries while my freaky twin shows me one of the worst memories of my life.Brilliant plan.Really solid strategy.”
The echo stepped back into her direct sightline, filling the space between her and the figure with the same slow, deliberate wrongness it had maintained from the beginning.Her own face looked back at her.Her own eyes, flat and strange.Her own smile, folded wrong.
“The book remembers,” it whispered.
She was really getting tired of that phrase.Myanin looked at the echo for a long moment without speaking, without moving, without revealing anything at all.When she finally answered, her voice had gone quiet, not weak, but stripped of the performance and the armor, the comfortable layer of sarcasm she’d been using since stepping into this place.“Yeah,” she said.“Well, so do I.”Not that she wanted to, and honestly, she’d tried to pushthatmemory as far away as possible.
The flames surged again, pressing harder.The magic tightened around her like a fist deciding to close, heavy and suffocating, pressing against the edges of her mind the way deep water pressed against glass, patient, methodical, testing for the smallest fracture.It wanted to pull her under.Wanted to flood her with the full weight of every second, every mistake, every moment she had chosen poorly, or moved too late, or let someone down who could not afford to be let down.
Myanin lifted her chin.She breathed in, let the breath become something solid inside her chest, and held it there until it was a foundation rather than a reflex.
“I accepted my fate and punishment,” she said, and her voice found its footing in the wreckage around her, steady and certain and entirely her own.“I was spared but not without consequences.And I have accepted those, embraced them and tried to atone for my wrong doings.”She didn’t understand why she felt the need to explain herself.Maybe because deep in her heart she didn’t feel like her punishment had been equal to the crime.In her heart of hearts, Myanin knew she didn’t deserve to walk the earth, or in any realm, because of what she’d done.
The world stuttered.
Not a metaphor, an actual, visible shudder ran through the fabric of the space around her, the flames pulling back mid-reach, the heavy dark sky flickering the way a candle did when wind brushed across it unexpectedly.The echo’s edges blurred, its shape losing its sharp confidence for just a moment before it gathered itself back together.
Shade didn’t move a muscle.
Myanin took a step forward.Then another.Toward the fire, toward the memory, toward the thing that had crawled inside her history and rearranged it into a weapon with her own hands.
“You want to remember?”Myanin’s voice sharpened, not with anger but with the particular clarity that came after anger had burned itself clean.“Then we remember all of it.The whole truth, not just the pieces that fit the story you’re trying to tell me.I don’t need the guilt trip, when I’ve been choking on the guilt since I grew a conscience.I don’t need the bloody book to remember the times I’ve cried out begging for it all to be taken away, swearing I’d give anything to go back and fix the past.So, yes, I know about my damn oaths, my promises, my pleading with the Great Luna or any creator that would listen.You’re going to have to try a bit harder to knock me down.”
