The fire crackled in the heart of the circle, its tongues of flame licking at the void, casting shifting shadows upon the earth. Around it, time did not move as it once had. It stretched, coiled, bent upon itself like a serpent swallowing its own tail.
I stood at the edge of it all, clad in the regalia of a thousand lives before me, feathers woven with forgotten prayers, beads strung with echoes of past selves. The wind whispered secrets through the hollow bones of my adornments, but I no longer needed to listen. I already knew.
Before me lay the thread, the tether of lifetimes. It glowed with a sickly light, pulsing like a vein too long constricted. It led backward, into the past, where old wounds festered and repeated in the endless cycle of return. My name had been spoken in many tongues, but one thing remained constant, I had been bound.
Bound to a story not my own. Bound to a presence that had long since decayed, yet refused to release its grip.
I turned my gaze from the fire and faced the past. Shadows of my former selves flickered in the distance, chained together like ghosts of the same suffering. And behind them, the one who had clung to me across lifetimes, weaving herself into my lineage like a parasite burrowed into the roots of an ancient tree.
She had walked in many forms, whispered from many mouths, played many roles. But always, the same force. The same gravity pulling me backward, away from the horizon that called me forward.
No more.
From my side, I lifted the hatchet. Not a mere blade, but a thing of will, a tool carved from intention itself. Its edge gleamed with the weight of decision, sharpened not by metal but by certainty.
With one breath, I raised it. With another, I brought it down.
The tether severed with no resistance, as if it had been waiting for this moment all along. And in that instant, the past unraveled. The false lineage, the illusory roots, the cyclic suffering, it all collapsed into nothingness, erased like an error in the great weave.
I turned back toward the fire, toward the future, and felt the first breath of unchained air fill my lungs. My feet moved before thought could follow.
And so I danced
No longer as the bound, no longer as the haunted, but as the one who had cut the cord.