I do not remember her voice. Not truly. I remember how it felt—like standing in the ocean with my back turned. You don’t hear the wave. You feel it pulling the shore away behind you. Then you are inside it.

Yelena was in Detroit for an XWF show, where she faced Aurora Gainsborough in the Ides of March tournament. It ended in a draw after the two collapsed and failed to meet the referee’s count.

That the end of the world began with a wrestling match was almost too absurd to believe. But it did.

She was supposed to return to Miami in the early hours of the next morning. Her day was full of corporate meetings at Bifrost and then that night she was meant to be Marisol’s plus one at the VilaroGala at Sacred Space Miami. However, shortly after one a.m., I received an updated flight plan for her private jet. It was no longer coming to Miami. It was going to Denmark.

I tried calling. No answer. I texted and received a response. Stop bothering me. Had to go to Fredensborg. Father’s house. None of your fucking business. I’ll call when I’m done. Tell Mari I’m fine. Or don’t. I DON’T CARE.

That wasn’t Yelena. I recognized the voice—blunt, cruel, untethered. It was Ira, one of her fractured personalities. There were seven in total, each distinct. They had been surfacing more often lately but never like this.

Never fully in control.

When I saw Mari in the morning I informed her that Yelena had been forced to fly to Copenhagen to attend to financial matters concerning her father’s estate. Disappointed, she texted Yelena. A moment later a reply came:

It’s wonderful! I wish you were here with me. I’ll take lots of pictures!

It wasn’t the bluster and anger of Ira.

But it didn’t read like Yelena, either.

I suspected it was Covetous, another one of the seven. Mari was convinced, however, and I had other matters to attend to.

I had planned to spend the day at Vesuvius.

The renovation was nearly complete. Most of the walls were up, the sound system had been installed, and the lighting team was scheduled to return with the final set of gel panels for the stage. The crew knew better than to call me unless something caught fire or someone died. Still, I liked to walk the floor—hands behind my back, heels clicking through the sawdust and neon haze. It was a new name, a new atmosphere. I loved the original name but it didn’t match my vision. Vesuvius was meant to be sharp, sensual, dangerous. Nothing soft survived long in heat like that.

But instead, I was in the Design District by ten a.m., sweating in silence as I stalked through boutiques in search of something—anything—that would pass for Gala-appropriate. Mari’s stylist had a conflict and Mari herself had already left for rehearsal, which meant I was alone. I did not like being alone when Yelena was missing.

I ended up at Rick Owens. The storefront was quiet, glacial, and unbothered by the weather. The sales assistant said nothing when I entered, which I appreciated. I selected a black silk column gown—high neck, backless, sleeveless, with asymmetrical stitching that reminded me of something surgical. It looked like mourning. It looked like armor. It looked like me.

By noon I was at my usual salon in Wynwood, where they understood not to ask questions or make small talk. I had them do a loose chignon with sharp parting and slicked sides, severe but not too studied. My makeup was matte. Blood-dark lips. No shimmer. Nothing eager.

By four p.m. I was back at the Vale—our compound, our sanctuary. I sat in my room with a glass of sparkling water, staring at my reflection without seeing it, waiting for Mari to finish her fittings. She burst in sometime after five, barefoot and glowing, her phone in one hand and a protein bar in the other. “You look insane,” she said. “In a good way.”

I smiled because I knew it would please her.

We left in the Maybach around six, with two of her handlers in the front and security trailing behind in a separate vehicle. An assassination attempt on Yelena two weeks prior had put everyone on high alert. Some might have felt uneasy traveling with armed guards—but not Mari. She was practicing her red carpet lines in a whisper, mouthing brand names and sponsor tags like sacred text. I watched the traffic roll by and tried not to check my phone again. But I did. Nothing from Yelena.

The VilaroGala was held at Sacred Space Miami, a venue that tries very hard to convince people it’s holy. I hated it there. Too many palms. Too much glass. The lighting is too forgiving.

The event was as vapid as I expected—tech bros trying to look spiritual, fashion girls trying to look expensive, local celebrities orbiting Mari like flies in designer silk. I stayed behind her and slightly to the left, playing my role. I held her clutch when needed. Smoothed her hair before photos. Whispered the name of a person she didn’t remember in time for her to smile with conviction. I was good at that.

Occasionally someone tried to engage me. I gave them very little.

I drank half a glass of wine. Switched to water. Ate nothing.

Every now and then, I checked my phone. Still nothing. Of course, by then it was five a.m. in Denmark.

She was probably asleep.

Probably.

The Gala ended shortly after one in the morning. I was on edge about Yelena—made worse by the need to keep soothing Mari’s own concerns with lies I barely believed myself.

As we were getting back into the car, I instructed Odion Zambo, our head of security, to drop me at Vesuvius. Mari objected, but I had no desire to go home just to sit in the dark, waiting for a phone call that might not come.

One of the guards offered to stay with me. The motorcade left us drenched in Miami neon on the corner beneath the towering black facade of Vesuvius. I dug the key out of my clutch and we went inside.

He was from Texas—his accent made that clear—but his name has been lost to time. He made me wait by the door while he swept the open space. I stared at my phone’s screen until he gave the all clear.

Vesuvius was empty, but not silent.

The bones of the building hummed with construction residue—distant buzz from a half-wired subwoofer, plastic sheeting shifting in the air vents, faint creaks of unfinished wood stretching in the humidity. It wasn’t comforting. It wasn’t threatening. It was waiting.

I made my rounds in the dress. Black silk, high neckline, backless. It wasn’t made for work, but I wasn’t made for sleep. I walked the floor slowly, checking on everything I could check. The barstools had arrived but not been unwrapped. A mirror had cracked near the VIP stairwell. One of the ceiling fixtures in the east corner was crooked by a fraction of an inch, which no one else would have noticed but I could not unsee.

At one point, I tore the hem of the gown on an exposed nail jutting from the underside of the DJ booth. The sound was sharp, decisive—a ripping meant to punish carelessness. I didn’t react. I touched the frayed edge with two fingers, then moved on.

Every twenty minutes or so, I checked my phone. The screen stayed blank. No calls. No messages. Not even an error from a failed signal.

By five, I’d removed my heels and set them on the stage. My feet left silent prints in the construction dust as I walked. I could feel the fabric of the dress catching around my legs—sweat had glued it to my skin. I didn’t care. I kept going.

By six, the sky was beginning to pale.

The guard had fallen asleep by the front door, one hand resting on his thigh, the other curled loosely around the grip of his holstered sidearm. He was young. Pretty in a way that would age poorly.

I didn’t wake him.

I was standing behind the bar  when I heard the door unlock.

Not open. Unlock.

It hadn’t made a sound when it closed earlier, but now it did. A click. A pull of air. A hush that spread down the stairwell and across the floor like something intelligent.

I turned slowly, still barefoot, still in the torn dress. I held my phone loosely in one hand.

Yelena stood at the entrance.

She was wearing dark joggers and a cashmere hoodie—off-black, tailored within an inch of its life. Her hair was down, longer than it had been when she left. Perfectly smooth. No makeup, no jewelry, no signs of the twelve-hour flight she had supposedly taken from Denmark. In fact, she looked… better than she had in years. Leaner. Sharper. Eyes brighter. As if she had gone away to some private monastery of light and blood and come back sanctified.

The guard stirred—shifted slightly—but didn’t wake. If anything, he seemed to slip further into sleep, as though something gentle and invisible had pressed its palm against his chest and told him to rest.

Yelena didn’t speak. She just looked at me. And smiled.

My heart lifted and dropped at once. I stepped forward but hesitated halfway. Something—something too faint to name—caught in my throat. It wasn’t fear. Not yet.

She crossed the room with the same quiet confidence I’d seen in a thousand press conferences, a hundred matches, a dozen late-night conversations when she’d held me together with a sentence. But now that gravity had changed direction. She wasn’t holding me up.

She was pulling me in.

“You are early,” I said, because I did not know what else to say. My tongue was still learning the shape of English—too blunt in places, too soft in others. The anxiety made it worse.

“I missed you,” she replied. The voice was right. But the tone was off.

Not loving. Not cold. Just… not hers.

She stepped aside—and that was when I saw it.

The case in her hand. Sturdy. Black. The kind used to transport instruments, or weapons, or rare things not meant to be touched. There was nothing unusual about its shape, nothing overtly menacing. But the air around it felt wrong. Not cold. Not hot. Just… aware.

I should have been afraid but it wasn’t fear I felt. It was something sweeter. Like the melody of a long-forgotten love song—too faint to hear, but still humming beneath the skin. Not sound. Not memory. Only sensation.

She walked to the bar with calm precision, her footsteps noiseless against the floor. The case was set down gently, reverently, like an offering laid at an altar no one else could see.

She unlatched it. Opened the lid.

From inside, she removed another object—smaller, denser. A box. Hexagonal. Black. Its surface matte, almost soft-looking, but the angles were too perfect to be safe. She placed it on the counter between us and stepped back.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a gift,” she said flatly.

“For me?”

My eyes moved to her with the question, but didn’t say long. The Box hungered for my gaze and I gave it willingly, drawn to it with the same curiosity as the dim lighting over the bar that almost seemed to stretch toward it at impossible gradients.

“For everyone,” she answered behind me. “But it wanted you first.”

Where others might have recoiled, I felt only stillness. Not peace—something richer. Denser. Like slipping into warm water that already knows your shape. It wasn’t her acceptance I felt anymore.

It came from deeper.

Not from the case, but from what waited inside it—something ancient and aching that had already made room for me. It didn’t see me as prey. It saw me as familiar.

I blinked once, like a camera shutter, and when my eyes opened, an ivory turnkey had emerged from the face of the Box.

There was no hesitation. I reached for it. It was smooth to the touch and expertly carved. As I began turning it, there was a muted resistance, like muscle under the skin. I felt it click into place—not a sound, but a shift. In the room. In me.

The Box began to change.

First came the sound, delicate and fractured—music, if music had ever been made from grief. A lullaby dragged backward through static. Somewhere Over the Rainbow, yes, but not for children. Not for dreaming. A version sung in the voice of something that no longer needed lungs.

Then came the movement. The top of the box lifted itself—not hinged, but blooming. The upper shell split along six seams, folding outward like the unfurling legs of an insect, or the petals of a time-lapsed flower. From within rose a carousel. Six mirrored panels turned slowly into position, each bordered by a frame of ridged black metal that caught no light. They pulsed—not with electricity, but with presence. Alive. Patient.

I stepped closer without meaning to.

The mirrors did not show me as I was. Not exactly.

THE FIRST MIRROR

I saw a memory—one I had not chosen. I was a teenager, small, bruised, screaming at my father in the kitchen in the house in Chișinău. His hand was raised. His voice breaking as he used the name he wanted. Alexey.

The one that was never mine.

The one he refused to let die.

I remembered crying as he dragged me into the crawlspace to lock me away again but in the mirror I did not cry.

In the mirror, I smiled.

THE SECOND MIRROR

The next one showed me older. Alone, in bed. My chest wrapped in a post-surgical bra, gauze and bandages. No makeup, no applause. Just bottles of pills on the table and silence. I was staring at the ceiling, wondering if I had made a mistake. Wondering if anyone would ever love me. My father’s voice in my head calling me a freak.

But in the mirror, I was already standing beside the bed, watching myself with a predator’s affection. A lover’s patience. Waiting to be let in.

The music pulsed through my ribs like a second heartbeat.

THE THIRD MIRROR

A casino bar in Reno. Loud. Sticky. Ugly with fluorescent light. I remembered the slot machines whining behind me, the smell of cheap beer clinging to every surface.

Yelena was still wrestling for UPRISING back then. We’d just wrapped a show in Reno. I didn’t want company. I wanted quiet. I wanted a drink. Something strong enough to chase the adrenaline into sleep.

But he found me anyway. Cowboy hat. Big arms. Clean smile. Said he’d seen me in the ring. Asked if I wanted to sit with him. We drank together. Whiskey and cheap conversation. He made me laugh once. Maybe twice.

When he asked if I wanted to come up to his room, I hesitated.

Not because I didn’t want to.

But because I had to tell him.

I remembered how I said it—gently, carefully, like apologizing for a stain on a shirt I hadn’t meant to wear. I didn’t say I was trans. I just told the truth.

In the real memory, he recoiled. Called me a freak. Said something about deception. About predators. About hell. He didn’t hit me, but it was close. Then he walked away.

In the mirror? He still walked away but I didn’t watch him go. I stood. Took a half-empty beer bottle from the bar. And shattered it across the back of his skull.

He stumbled forward—bleeding, shocked, mouth open but too slow to scream. I followed. Calm. Silent.

I drove the broken glass into his neck once. Twice. Three times. Until hands pulled me off. Security. Onlookers. Screaming. Shouting.

But I was smiling.

My face lit up like it had been waiting for this. Like it had earned it.

I didn’t feel small. I felt correct.

THE FOURTH MIRROR

A street corner. Wet pavement. The stink of diesel and urine and sweat. A man with a knife. He smelled like something that used to be alive. He had already taken my phone.

I saw myself the way Yelena must have: shaking, crying, too paralyzed to run. I remembered begging. I remembered the sound of my voice. The pitch of it. Small. Ugly. Weak.

The knife came down. There was a spray. Her blood hit my face in warm ribbons.

I screamed her name.

I screamed and did nothing.

In the real memory, I dropped to my knees to find my phone and call for help. But in the mirror?

In the mirror, I never looked away.

I watched her turn the knife into his own belly. Watched it enter him. Watched his body open. I did not scream. I did not shake.

They collapsed. I didn’t call 911. I stepped over him and took the knife from his chest with one elegant motion.

I held it like it had always belonged to me.

The carousel kept turning, each mirror peeling away more softness, more pretense, more human shame. I did not step back. I leaned in.

THE FIFTH MIRROR

It was daytime this time. Miami heat rising off asphalt. Traffic noise below the balcony. I saw myself standing beside Yelena, both of us looking up at a crumbling art deco building on Washington Avenue. Its windows were boarded. The awning was half-torn, the interior gutted. It smelled like rot and rain and time.

She had just wired the final funds. I’d signed the last document. It was mine. The first building I ever owned.

I remembered laughing—one of those rare, unguarded laughs that start in the gut and make you forget who’s watching.

The sign above the entry read: The Black Rainbow.

That was the name I gave it. I don’t know why. It came to me in a dream and I thought it felt wrong in a right way. Like something carved into me long before I knew to look for it.

I remembered how Yelena looked at me. Proud. A little distant. Like she could already see what it would become. Then my phone buzzed.

A text. My mother.

I remembered the way my chest clenched before I even read the string of Romanian text. Like my body already knew what it would say.

I hadn’t seen her in years—I don’t even know how she got my number—but she had seen me on television with Yelena and tracked me down. Not to ask how I was. Not to congratulate me.

She wrote: Emilia? Is that what you’re calling yourself now? Must be nice to play pretend with the money of that bitch who killed your father.

I remembered how the heat left my skin. How the joy collapsed inside me like a bad foundation. How shame moved in to take its place. Yelena did kill my father after she found out he was locking me in the crawlspace under the stairs but that wasn’t the source of my humiliation.

What haunted me was knowing that I was too weak to do it myself.

In the mirror, I didn’t shrink.

I didn’t freeze.

I turned the phone face down on the balcony rail, pressed it under my palm, and shattered it with one clean motion. Then I looked at Yelena and said, with no tremble in my voice:

“This is where it begins.”

Not with an apology.

Not with permission.

With naming.

Behind us, the new sign flickered.

The Black Rainbow.

It didn’t mark a business. It marked a truth.

In the mirror, I didn’t wonder who I was.

I remembered.

THE FINAL MIRROR

The final mirror turned.

It did not show me.

It showed her.

Maraeth.

Not Yelena. Not entirely.

Her smile was mine. Her eyes—mine, too, but older, deeper, ruined beautifully. She raised a hand and placed it against the inside of the mirror.

Without hesitation, I matched it.

And that was when I felt it: the whisper beneath the music. A wordless melody pressed into the marrow of my bones. Not language. Not command.

A welcoming.

Tears filled my eyes without falling. My body did not tremble. I did not faint. I did not recoil. I opened. I unfolded.

And somewhere behind me, the sleeping guard exhaled deeper—dreaming a dream not his own.

I stared at the Box, and a word resonated in my mind. A word from no language I had ever learned, but somehow already knew.

Thul Ro’Dûr.

“The Gateway to Darkness.”

Most would know it by a simpler name: the Chrysalis.

When I was ready, it allowed me to look away.

I turned. Searched for Yelena.

She was there.

But it wasn’t her.

It was Maraeth.

Zhazhaloraneth. The Eater of Dreams.

From that moment forward, I was never awake and never asleep. I was underneath.

The world was thinned to silk.

My past unraveled inside me like a loose thread—something I had worn so long I forgot it was choking me.

Some may say I was indoctrinated.

They don’t understand.

I was not converted. I was embraced.

Everything after that was lightless and beautiful.

And all I had to do was give up everything I never wanted to keep.