BLEEDING VELVET

"Some churches are built from hope. Mine was built from warnings."—Almond

The woman in the red cloak didn't move. Didn't breathe. Her silhouette rippled like smoke beneath a full moon, body half-shadow, voice all mother.

Almond's steps slowed. Her pulse did not.

"Mira?" she asked.

The voice responded, calm, too calm:

"I gave you to the flame. And the flame gave you back. I call that balance."

Velda drew her blade. Kairo reached for a spell. Almond just stood there—torn between love and murder.

"I watched you burn," she said.

"I watched you survive."

The woman stepped forward. Smoke peeled from her shoulders, revealing skin that glowed like molten ash.

Mira.

But not the mother Almond remembered.

This one had black eyes.

And a voice that echoed.

She wasn't alive. Not really.

A vessel. A puppet.

The Prophet had hollowed Mira out and made her a mirror.

"You carry my blood," Mira said. "You carry my curse."

Almond stepped forward, jaw set. "I broke the curse."

"No," the mirror-Mira said. "You became it."

The clearing erupted.

Hands burst from the soil. Eyes blinked open in the trees. The air choked with phantom hymns.

A church rose from the ground—twisted wood, bone pews, a pulpit dripping with candles.

Kairo grabbed Almond's arm. "We have to go."

But Almond didn't move.

This was her memory now.

This was her inheritance.

The church welcomed her like a womb reborn.

Inside, time didn't pass.

She saw herself at 7, eyes wide, blood on her dress. Her first spell. Her first death.

Velda saw her own father—beaten, begging for her to run.

Kairo saw the twin brother he'd buried.

Everyone's ghosts had come home.

The Prophet's altar waited.

And Mira knelt before it, hands folded.

"My daughter," she whispered, "will marry power or be consumed by it."

Almond stepped into the aisle.

And the doors slammed shut behind her.

It was a test.

The Prophet's final scripture.

Not a spell.

Not a blade.

A question:

Who are you, when no one's watching?

Almond walked the aisle like it was her execution.

With every step, her past played beside her.

The night she bled for the first time—over a grave.

The night she screamed her true name into a mirror.

The night she kissed Aren and tasted possession.

She reached the pulpit. And the Prophet's voice echoed—not from a body, but from everywhere.

"You bound me in a blade. But my altar remembers."

Almond lifted her dagger.

"I'm not here to finish you."

"Then why come?"

"To bury you where I can watch you rot."

She stabbed the altar.

The church screamed.

And everything burned.

When the flames died, Almond stood alone.

Velda and Kairo were outside the church, shaken but breathing.

The building had vanished.

Aren sat on the ground, crying quietly.

"I saw everything," he whispered. "I saw him. In me."

Almond knelt.

And held him.

"Then we cut him out. Together."

But that night, as Almond slept…

The dagger pulsed beneath her pillow.

And someone whispered:

"Wife."