Chapter 7: The Girl Who Burned for Us
Selene didn't sleep.
She watched Aria instead.
The girl lay curled beneath a paint-stained blanket on the gallery floor, her breaths soft and uneven, as if she was still half-running in her dreams. She was too tired to ask more questions. Too innocent to know the cost of the silence Selene kept.
She looked the same.
Exactly the same.
Even after death.
Even after everything.
⸻
Selene closed her eyes.
And saw it again.
That final night.
The broken sky above them bleeding fire. The ground beneath their feet cracking open like a mouth hungry for names.
And Aria—standing in front of them all.
Arms trembling. Blood soaking her hair. Her dress torn, but her eyes—clear, bright, devastating.
The enemy had found them. There was no escape. No miracle left. Hope had curled inward like a dying flower.
But Aria smiled.
A quiet, knowing smile. The kind only someone who had made peace with the impossible could wear.
And then—she stepped forward.
Into the fire.
Into the end.
And she gave everything.
⸻
Selene had screamed.
She fought.
Begged.
Clawed her way through smoke and ruin, cursing the gods and the timelines and fate itself. But Aria never turned around.
She kept walking toward the monsters, toward the unraveling, toward the end of all things.
Just before the world split, she turned her face to the sky and whispered something that carved itself into Selene's bones:
"You were all worth it."
⸻
The power had bloomed from her chest—like light exploding from a seed too long buried. A pulse. A wave. A storm in the shape of love and fury.
The enemy was erased.
The timeline collapsed.
The world—reset.
And Selene woke up gasping in a body that should not have existed. In a city stitched together from echoes. With a name she remembered, and a history no one else did.
Alive.
But Aria was a stranger again.
⸻
Now, in the dim candlelight of the ruined studio, Aria stirred.
Selene stiffened from her spot by the door, still half-shadow, half-sentinel.
"Are you watching me?" Aria mumbled, voice sleep-heavy.
Selene looked away, quickly.
"No."
A beat of silence.
Aria's voice came again, quieter this time, barely audible through the hush of falling ash outside:
"…Do you think we'll survive this?"
Selene closed her eyes.
She didn't want to lie. But the truth was too heavy to speak.
So she offered something else. Something stranger.
"I don't think," she said softly. "I remember."
Aria didn't reply. Her breathing slowed again, drifting back into sleep.
Selene didn't move.
She remained there through the night—watching, listening, guarding.
Keeping a promise Aria no longer remembered.
And wondering, with something bitter and breaking beneath her ribs, how long she could keep pretending she didn't still love her.
That she hadn't loved her across lifetimes.
And that, deep down, she wouldn't burn again if asked.
Not for the world.
But for her.