🌒 Part 4: All the Names We Buried
The day after the mirror shattered, Claire began to forget simple things.
Where she parked the car.
What she said five minutes ago.
The names of street signs she used to pass every day.
She told herself it was stress. Exhaustion. Postpartum fog. But deep down, something colder whispered the truth — she was being erased, one fragile memory at a time.
Elara, meanwhile, had begun to speak in fragments.
At first it was nothing. Baby babble. Gurgles.
Then one afternoon, while Claire fed her in silence, Elara looked up and said:
“Ashes don’t cry, mama.”
Claire dropped the spoon.
---
The therapist Claire called didn’t believe in curses. Or inherited trauma. Or veiled women in old mirrors.
But she did believe in dissociation, transgenerational grief, and the idea that children sometimes carry the screams their mothers never voiced.
“I think you’re holding too much,” she said kindly. “Maybe it’s time to… let go of the past.”
Claire smiled weakly and left before the session ended.
She couldn’t explain to someone who hadn’t seen it.
The spiral wasn’t a symbol of grief.
It was a path.
One she had already stepped onto.
And there was no turning back.
---
Nina returned three nights later with a bag full of books, research notes, and one particularly worn tome she had gotten through a private network of occult historians.
“This is the book Amelia had a copy of,” she said. “The one Catherine was trying to replicate.”
Claire took it in both hands. It smelled of rain and ink.
The title had been scratched off.
But on the first page, written in looping, elegant handwriting, were the words:
> “To those who forgot their own names — may this book remember them for you.”
---
They began translating it together — page by page, line by line.
The entries spoke of a “Thin Place” — a veil between time and memory, between what had happened and what refused to die.
The Veiled Woman was not a monster. She was a keeper. Of lineage. Of secrets. Of the names mothers had swallowed so their daughters wouldn’t choke on them.
And every few generations, when silence grew too loud… she came to collect what was owed.
---
Claire found a passage that made her blood run cold:
> “The echo always returns. The mother hides. The daughter hears. The child becomes the next mother, and the cycle tightens. Only when a mother speaks the name she buried will the echo break.”
Claire stared at the line.
“What name did Mom bury?” she whispered.
Nina looked down. “Maybe it wasn’t a name. Maybe it was a truth.”
But Claire shook her head.
“No. It was a name. I feel it in my teeth.”
---
That night, Claire lay awake with Elara sleeping beside her.
She whispered every name she knew — her mother’s, her grandmother’s, even the name of her childhood cat.
None of them felt like the one.
Then Elara stirred in her sleep and muttered a sound Claire hadn’t heard since she was ten:
“Liora.”
Claire sat up.
That name wasn’t in any book. Wasn’t in any file.
But she remembered now.
Liora was her imaginary friend.
The one she talked to for hours in her room. The one who told her stories. Who taught her to braid her hair.
The one who disappeared the night Claire had her first seizure.
– “Where Liora Waits”
Claire sat with the name Liora echoing through her body like a song she had forgotten how to sing — not just in her mind, but in her bones.
She pulled out old journals, photos, scraps of notebooks. There was no mention of Liora.
Except… one.
A drawing.
A crude sketch, clearly made by a child — her — with stick figures and names scribbled underneath:
“Claire and Liora under the tree.”
The tree had eyes.
She showed it to Nina.
“She wasn’t imaginary,” Claire said. “She was real.”
“Or something pretending to be,” Nina replied carefully. “Something that’s been with you since you were a child.”
They returned to the house. This time, in daylight. Elara stayed with a trusted neighbor.
Claire led Nina into the woods behind the property, walking a path she hadn’t stepped on since she was nine — the path to The Listening Tree.
That’s what she used to call it.
It was still there.
A gnarled old oak, tall and wide and hollowed near the base, its bark scarred with spirals — dozens of them.
Inside the hollow trunk was a child’s blanket.
Faded.
Worn.
Claire knelt and touched it. “This was mine.”
The air grew colder.
And from somewhere within the forest came the faintest whisper:
“Liora.”
They set up a camera trap around the tree that night. Motion sensors. Audio recorders. Nina had tech from her university’s anthropology lab.
Around 2:13 a.m., Claire woke from a restless sleep and checked her phone.
There was a motion alert.
She opened the app.
The footage showed nothing for the first ten seconds. Then, the wind shifted.
The blanket moved.
Then — something stepped into frame.
A girl.
Long black hair. Back turned to the camera. Silent.
She stood perfectly still. Then turned slowly toward the lens.
Her face was covered in a white veil.
And beneath the veil… glowed spirals.
Claire gasped. Dropped the phone.
The camera fizzled.
Nina sat up. “What?”
“She's real,” Claire whispered. “She’s still here. And she’s waiting for me.”
The next day, Claire returned to the Listening Tree alone.
She didn’t bring a flashlight. She didn’t bring Elara. She brought only a tape recorder and the old journal from her mother.
She stepped into the hollow trunk.
And began to speak:
“Liora… if you were part of me… if I forgot you… I remember now. I remember the stories you told. The way you said I was the only one who listened. I’m here. I’m not afraid.”
For a moment, silence.
Then — the bark beneath her hand shifted.
Like it breathed.
A voice rose from inside the tree, layered and childlike and old all at once:
“You broke the promise.”
Claire stood frozen.
Then the tree cracked.
A slit in the wood opened… revealing a small wooden box.
She took it with shaking hands.
Inside: a lock of dark hair, a tiny bell, and a note in her mother’s handwriting.
> “I bound her for you. She loved you too much. But love, uncontained, becomes hunger. I’m sorry, Claire. I thought I was saving you. But maybe I only delayed her.”
Claire dropped to her knees.
The wind howled.
Back home, Claire placed the bell beside Elara’s crib.
The baby woke just long enough to reach out, touch it… and smile.
Then she said the word again, clear as day:
“Liora.”
Claire stared into her daughter’s eyes.
And for the briefest moment, she saw another child staring back.
Her own reflection — younger, smiling, tears in her eyes.
Elara blinked — and the moment was gone.
Claire whispered, “You’re not her, are you?”
Elara blinked slowly.
“No,” a voice whispered.
“But she’s still inside you.”
