25 partes Concluida Contenido adultoShe hadn't meant to be gone so long. Eight hours, the maids whispered... eight hours since the child's first cry shattered the sterile walls. She kept her back to them, hands rough with clay and dust, sculpting a face she couldn't yet look into. Every plea from the door was a nail in her ribs: Come see her. Just once. Just a glance.
But fear is louder than love.
What if the world pressed its knives into this tiny body the way it had pressed them into hers? What if her daughter's eyes one day held the same hollow ache?
When she finally stood at the threshold, her heart folding in on itself, she dared not reach out. The baby was too small, too soft, too impossibly clean for hands like hers... hands that had shaped pain into something almost beautiful.
So instead, with a voice that cracked like old paper, she sang. Not to soothe the child, but maybe to quiet the screaming thing inside herself.
"Hush, little ember, don't cry in the rain,
The sky only weeps to mirror your pain.
Sleep in the cradle of thunder and light,
Dream past the scars that whisper at night.
Hush, little ember, the world's far and wide,
I'll carve you a shelter, I'll carve you a sky.
Your bones will be strong where mine once did break,
Sleep, little ember... you are not a mistake."