She looks like me.
My eyes sting. I didn’t know I could look like that. Didn’t know there was a version of me that moved through the world without bracing for the next blow.
That’s you, something whispers. Not a voice. Just knowing.That’s who you were always supposed to be.
I watch her a moment longer. Watch the way she moves without the weight I’ve carried my whole life. Watch the thorns spiral up her arms when she laughs, green-gold light pulsing in time with her joy.
Then I close the box.
And I let go.
Not of her. Of everything else.
The grip I’ve held for twenty-eight years. The desperate clinging to a version of myself that was never real. The fear that if I stopped being Ash Morgan, there would be nothing left.
My hands shake. My breath comes out ragged. But I don’t stop.
I let it all go.
The sensation is strange. Not painful. Not like the goddesses’ assault. More like peeling off a wet suit that’s been slowly suffocating me. Layer by layer, the glamour dissolves. I feel it leaving my skin, my bones, my blood. Feel it releasing its hold on my cells one at a time.
My spine lengthens. Just slightly. Just enough that I feel taller even sitting down.
My ears ache for a moment, then settle into new shapes. Points. Delicate and strange and right.
My hair shifts against my shoulders. Longer now, heavier, and when I catch a strand between my fingers it’s not the dark brown I’ve known my whole life. It’s pink fading to silver, with green at the roots like I’m a plant growing toward the sun.
I should be freaking out. I’m not. It feels right in a way nothing has ever felt right before.
The thorns beneath my skin wake up.
Not just pulse. Bloom. I feel them spreading across my ribs, up my arms, down my spine. Not painful. Not invasive. Just...present. Like they’ve always been there, waiting for permission to exist.
I open my eyes.
Kieran’s face goes slack. Orion’s mouth falls open.
“Holy shit,” Orion breathes.
I look down at my hands. The coin machine scar is still there. So is the shrapnel mark on my shoulder. So is every single wound I earned being Ash Hayes-Morgan.
But around them, beneath them, through them, green-gold patterns spiral and shift. Ivy and thorns woven together, pulsing with my heartbeat, alive in a way that should terrify me.
It doesn’t.
It feels like coming home.
“The scars stayed,” I say, and my voice sounds different. Deeper. More resonant. Like it’s coming from somewhere older than my throat.
“Told you.” Orion’s grin is shaky but real. “Permanent.”
Kieran hasn’t moved. He’s staring at me like I’m a stranger and the love of his life all at once. Like he’s seeing me for the first time and recognizing me from a dream he forgot he had.
“Troublesome thing,” he says softly. “You’re?—”
“Different?”
“Magnificent.”
