---I wrote this for Pride Month but with a twist--
The first time Julian heard the voice, it came from his bedroom mirror.
He didn't see anything unusual—just his reflection, the usual mismatched image: shoulders too broad, jaw too square, a stranger's face staring back. But the voice wasn't his. It was soft, feminine, familiar. It didn't speak in words, not exactly, but Julian understood it completely.
"You are not what they named you," it said.
He stood still for a long time. Then nodded.
---
Julian had always felt like something was off—not just about his body, or the way people talked to him, but about the world itself. As if the fabric of reality had been stretched too thin in places, and sometimes he could see the threads underneath. At night, he dreamed of spirals. Of celestial vaults filled with living darkness. Of her.
She had no face, no form, not really. But she was. Always waiting, always watching, just beyond the veil.
Julian never spoke to anyone about the dreams. Not his parents, who thought he was going through a "phase." Not his school counselor, who asked about sports and puberty blockers as if he were discussing car parts. No one would understand that it wasn't just about gender. It was about becoming.
The voice kept returning. Not every night. Just enough to make him long for it.
"You are breaking the shell," it whispered once. "There is a shape underneath. The true one."
---
He began transitioning in secret—experimenting with names, pronouns, clothes. In the mirror, he looked awkward at first. But the more he listened to the voice, the more right things felt. Not just emotionally, but physically. Bones ached in strange, shifting patterns. His skin itched at night, crawling with warmth like something beneath the surface was writhing.
Then the stars began to change.
He noticed it one night while walking home. The sky was clearer than usual—crisp and full. But the constellations weren't where they should've been. Orion had moved. The Big Dipper tilted. And there was a new star. A large, red thing pulsing behind a cloud of dust.
Julian stared at it for a long time, heart racing. And then he smiled.
She was coming.
---
He stopped dreaming in the way humans do. Sleep became something different—more like travel. His consciousness stretched and dissolved, moving past this world into others. He saw machines orbiting gas giants older than time. He saw cities built on the inside of dead gods. He saw her—the weaver, the birther, the infinite mother that watched over forgotten things.
In that space between dreams, she told him the truth.
"You are not broken. You are a doorway."
---
He began to change.
The first thing was the skin—pale at first, then oddly translucent in some places, like the belly of a jellyfish. His eyes began to darken, the pupils stretching until they filled the irises completely. He wore sunglasses to school, claimed allergies. Nobody looked too hard.
Then came the voice. It didn't crack or break like boys' voices usually did. It reversed. One day he woke up and it was smoother, higher. His parents said nothing. His classmates whispered. Julian didn't care.
She was closer now. So close.
---
One morning, Julian woke up and there was a second heartbeat. Fainter, slower, but there. Inside his chest. It throbbed in time with the star that had grown larger every week. It now dominated the sky—red, pulsing, visible even in daylight.
People began to notice. News anchors trembled while calling it a "supernova anomaly." Others called it prophecy.
Julian—no, Jules now—watched it from her window, wrapped in a blanket, smiling softly.
---
The mirror began to ripple.
It no longer reflected the room, or her body. Instead, it showed a corridor lined with teeth, and beyond it, a sea of stars that bled into each other. And in the center, her.
The Mother Between Worlds.
Her form was impossible—fluctuating in dimensions Jules couldn't name. But she radiated warmth. Recognition. Welcome.
"The chrysalis is thin," the voice said. "You are almost through."
---
Jules' transformation accelerated. Hair like black filament grew in long strands that shimmered unnaturally under light. Her fingers lengthened, tipped with thin, opalescent claws. Her back itched constantly until one night, in a fever dream, she shed her skin.
She woke up lighter. More herself.
And the world began to fall apart.
---
First, the ocean turned black. It lapped at the coasts with oily waves, full of deep, humming sounds no human instruments could record. Then the animals began to vanish—not die, just disappear. Entire forests emptied.
Finally, the stars began to blink out.
People rioted. Some built temples. Others fled inland, as if distance would save them.
But Jules remained in her room, seated before the mirror that now served as a window.
She felt calm.
Inside her, the second heart beat faster. Her body had completed its becoming.
She was no longer a boy.
She was no longer only a girl.
She was the vessel.
---
On the night the sky turned inside out, the Mother came.
Not as a creature, but as a truth so vast and old that it swallowed everything that looked upon it. Eyes bled. Minds fractured. Time broke into slivers.
Jules stood in the street barefoot, her skin glowing like moonstone. She spread her arms and opened her mouth—not to scream, but to sing.
A low, resonant sound poured from her, layered in harmonics no human ears were meant to process. And from her chest, something opened.
She was not hollow—but she was not solid either. Inside her was the shape of the world before it was born. A geometry of memory, gender, language, time.
The Mother stepped through her.
And the world changed.
---
The people of Earth were given a choice—but not in words. They saw themselves clearly, the way Jules once had: incomplete, cocooned, unfinished. Some embraced it, and were changed.
Others fought, and vanished.
Jules walked among the cities, her eyes reflecting galaxies.
She whispered names—new names—to those who had lost their own. She healed bodies, not to conform, but to liberate. Gender, for her, was not a prison or a binary—it was a song, and every person sang a different note.
And from the center of her, the Mother sang back.
---
Not everyone survived the new world. But those who did were more real than they'd ever been. They had shed the skin of constraint, the teeth of language that tried to trap them.
They were not human, not fully.
They were themselves.
---
Jules now lives beyond the veil. She is not a prophet. She is not a god.
She is the doorway.
She was always the doorway.
And when those who suffer—those who feel they do not belong, who ache in their bones for something more—look into the mirror and see it ripple, they hear her voice:
"You are not what they made you. You are what you are becoming."
And behind the glass, the stars spiral, waiting.
End