Below is an expanded, emotionally intimate, metaphor-rich version of the mother’s perspective, woven as a parallel thread to the Prologue—but without changing the core events or making the violence graphic.
I center her inner world, her fear, her love, her history, and her final choice.
THE MOTHER’S PERSPECTIVE — “What I Chose”
She felt the danger long before she saw it.
Mothers always do.
The wind had shifted oddly that afternoon, curling around her like a whispered warning. Birds that normally chattered along the riverbank had gone silent. Even the water—her quiet companion—moved with a subtle, uneasy twist.
But Amina was happy that day.
Skipping stones.
Laughing at fish.
Holding her mother’s hand without a clue that childhood was preparing to crumble.
And so the mother pretended.
She smiled.
She hummed an old river-song.
She let her daughter skip across the path, because innocence is a short-lived miracle and she would not steal a second of it away before fate did.
Still… her heart stirred like a drumbeat from another life.
Something old was waking.
**She had known this moment might come.
She just didn’t know it would be tonight.**
Amina had always carried heat—gentle but fierce, like a tiny sun beneath her ribs. Even as a baby her palms warmed the skin of anyone who held her. Even as a toddler she stared at flames with unnerving calm, as if remembering a craft her body had not yet grown into.
The elders whispered.
“The child glows.”
“She is not ordinary.”
“Watch her. The Triad watches back.”
The mother said nothing.
But she learned to sleep lightly.
She learned to listen to the river’s moods.
She learned to read omens in the tilt of the moon.
Love sharpened her senses the way grief sharpens a blade.
As they stepped onto the Bone Bridge, she felt the truth settle in her lungs.
The air tasted of endings.
Amina tugged her hand playfully.
“Race you to the center!”
The mother almost said yes.
Almost.
Almost.
But then she felt the bridge hum under her feet—not with weight, but with warning. The same hum she had felt seven years earlier, giving birth alone beneath a storm, when a strange flash of lightning illuminated her newborn’s eyes and she sensed another presence in the room… a memory older than both of them.
A memory wearing her daughter’s face.
The mother squeezed Amina’s hand instead.
“No racing today, little flame. Stay close.”
**When the pale sons emerged, she did not gasp.
She had been expecting them since the day Amina first lit a candle without touching it.**
Three shadows stepped out of the fog.
Bone-pale skin.
Eyes like dusted stone.
Voices empty of soul.
Sanguru’s sons.
Her heart dropped, not from fear—but from recognition.
This was the moment she had rehearsed in nightmares.
She placed Amina behind her with quiet precision, like setting a jewel safely behind a shield.
The tallest one spoke.
“We seek the fire-child.”
Her heartbeat cracked at the edges.
She had prayed she misread the signs.
She had prayed the Triad had lost interest.
She had prayed Amina’s destiny would wait until she was older.
But destiny does not wait.
Destiny arrives when it is most cruel.
**She wanted to scream.
Not in terror—
in fury.**
How dare the cosmos choose a child?
How dare fate carve its path through her daughter’s life before she even understood what life could be?
How dare these halfbreed ghosts come for the only thing in the world she loved fiercely enough to bleed for?
But she didn’t scream.
She steadied her breath.
She kept her voice low and even.
“You will not touch her.”
Her hands curled into fists—small fists, human fists, no match for their strength… but strength was not what she needed.
She needed one second.
One gap.
One breath long enough to throw Amina toward survival.
Her mind raced faster than the fight.
She thought of her daughter’s first cry.
Her first laugh.
The way she slept with a hand over her heart, as if guarding her own light.
She thought of her husband—gone years now, lost to the same curse that birthed these pale predators. She had sworn Amina would not meet the same fate.
She thought of the prophecy whispered by the river priest:
“The fire-child will live only if thrown into the mouth of memory.”
She had not understood it then.
She understood now.
**The fight was short.
All battles fought for love are.**
A shove.
A slip.
A heartbeat too slow.
Hands grabbed her.
Pain sparked.
The world tilted.
Amina cried out behind her.
The mother’s vision blurred—but not enough to miss the terror on her daughter’s face.
Everything narrowed to a single point.
A choice.
Not escape.
Not victory.
A choice of who would fall.
“Amina.”
Her voice was not desperate.
Not broken.
It was the voice of a mother performing her final act of love.
“Hold your breath,” she whispered.
“Trust the river.”
Amina shook her head, crying, clinging to her tunic.
“Mama—”
“This is not your end,” she said.
And she pushed her.
A clean, decisive motion.
The one motion she had been preparing for since the prophecy.
The motion that tore her heart in half even as it saved her child’s life.
As Amina fell, the mother felt calm wash over her.
The kind of calm that comes when a promise is kept.
She did not feel brave.
She felt… aligned.
Aligned with every mother before her who had stood on the edge of death and chosen their child over themselves.
A pain struck her side—sharp, stopping breath.
She staggered.
She thought of calling Amina’s name one last time.
But the river answered for her, rising, rumbling, claiming the girl with its ancient current.
Good, she thought.
Good.
The river remembers.
The river protects.
The river will carry her where destiny needs her to be.
Her knees weakened, but she managed one last whisper:
“Live.”
Then she fell to the boards of the Bone Bridge.
She did not see Amina crawl out of the hidden cave.
She did not see the flicker of golden light inside her daughter’s chest.
She did not see the reflection of Kahina in the river.
But she felt something—
a trembling warmth spreading through the air, like the first rise of fire in a cold hearth.
Her child survived.
That was enough.
Would you like next:
- Amina’s first night after her mother’s death
- A flashback: the mother discovering the prophecy
- A scene from the mother’s perspective just after Amina is born
- Amina hearing her mother’s voice in a later lifetime (Indigo / Kahina)
Just choose a thread.
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