Mary had a little lamb

The village had changed.

The houses were still there, but the people were not. What remained wore their skins—smiling too wide, eyes too dull. They moved through rituals, living by the light of a sun that hadn’t risen in weeks.

At the edge of the woods, where frost had never melted, the Chapel of the Gate stood taller than ever.

And beneath it all, somewhere deep in that dreamworld of velvet and void… Mary existed.

But then—he came.

The stranger.

He arrived without warning, walking barefoot from the woods just before twilight. No one saw him enter the village. No one remembered seeing him at all—until he was there.

He wore black, but not out of mourning. His coat shimmered with strange symbols when the wind hit just right. His skin was warm despite the snow. And his eyes—his eyes were the color of worn pages, filled with stories that hadn’t yet happened.

He said his name was Ash.

And he was looking for someone.

Ash didn’t ask questions.

He already knew the answers.

He walked to Mary’s cottage without directions. Fed her chickens. Sat by the empty hearth and watched the smoke dance in the shape of her laugh.

He left offerings at the chapel’s threshold—three drops of wine, a strip of linen, a stone shaped like a heart.

Sebastian watched from the shadows, rippling between dimensions, growing restless.

Ash wasn’t like the others.

He didn’t worship. He didn’t kneel.

He waited.

The first sign came after three days.

A mirror reappeared in Mary’s house. It hadn’t been there in years. In its silver face, Ash stood alone… but his reflection smiled.

The second came at dusk.

Ash stood in the center of the chapel, beneath the cracked bell. He whispered something—soft, loving—and for the first time in decades, Mary blinked.

Deep in the velvet world, her dream fractured.

Sebastian howled in fury. His song became shrill, unstable. The sky darkened.

“Who is he?” Mary asked, swaying in a field of glass-bladed grass. “Why does he feel… like a part of me?”

“He’s a lie,” Sebastian snarled. “A thief.”

But Mary felt it in her bones: the familiarity. The warmth she hadn’t known since before Sebastian. The sense that someone, somewhere, still saw her as whole.

“Don’t you remember?” Sebastian hissed. “You chose me.”

And she had.

But choice, she was learning, could be rewritten.

That night, Ash found the hidden chamber beneath the chapel. The pulsing gate. The throne of wool. And at its center, the hollow shape of Mary—her eyes closed, her heart flickering.

Ash knelt for the first time.

And whispered her name.

Not Mary.

But her true name. The one she’d buried when she was a child in the snow. The name her mother had whispered as she died. The name Sebastian had stolen to forge his gate.

The name only one other could know.

Because he had once lived inside her too.

Ash touched her face. "You don’t remember me yet. But I was there, before him. I was the voice that told you not to go into the woods. I was the dream that made you stay inside. I was the love that waited.”

Mary gasped.

And somewhere inside her, something else woke up.

The truth.

Sebastian roared.

He descended like a storm, cloaked in bone and wool, his form fracturing reality with every step. “She is mine!” he bellowed. “I made her.”

Ash stood tall.

“No,” he said. “You hollowed her out. But I remember what she was before.”

Their eyes met.

Two forces—equal in devotion, opposite in nature.

Sebastian: the love that consumed.

Ash: the love that waited.

And between them, Mary—no longer asleep.

Slowly, she turned.

Her voice trembled, but she spoke clearly.

“Tell me,” she whispered. “Who are you really?”

Ash smiled gently.

“I am the part of you that refused to break.”

And the chapel shattered.