What Mara Becomes
The mirror did not ripple when Mara stepped through. It broke. A thousand strands of light lashed out, then pulled inward, vanishing into silence.
Ana fell to her knees.
The silver thread now lay dead across her palms, split and scorched. The grove was quiet again—but not the same kind of quiet. This was the stillness of something watching.
And then, the mirror began to mend.
Not with glass, but with veins—dark roots twisting across the pool's surface, pulsing faintly with light. From its depths, something stirred. A form. Rising.
Mara—but not as she had been.
She stepped from the black mirror barefoot, her eyes no longer violet, but deep obsidian with pinpricks of starlight inside them. Her hair moved as if underwater. Her skin held faint sigils—burned in, not inked—and her voice, when she spoke, was both hers and not.
"I remember everything now."
Ana backed away, breath caught in her throat. "Mara?"
"I was a fragment," Mara said. "A piece of you, of her, of all the selves we denied. The mirror gave me the rest. I am the part that chose exile. The one who walked away from fate."
She held out her hand.
"But now I've returned. And I'm no longer just Mara."
Ana hesitated.
"What are you?"
"I'm the one who walks the Path Between," Mara said. "The Mirror Witch. I guard the thresholds. I remember the lives we didn't live. And I can offer you one."
Ana felt her chest tighten. "Offer me…?"
"A choice," Mara said. "To keep being what you are—fragmented, fading—or to become whole. But if you take the Path, you leave everything behind. Even me."
Ana looked at the repaired mirror, now dark and still.
She had found Mara. But Mara had become something else—more.
Now it was Ana's turn to decide.