A man stood at the edge of the world.
Not quite young, not yet old. Worn, weathered, quiet.
His boots pressed into the ash-covered earth, where the soil still steamed from a battle long silenced. Smoke twisted like ghostly ribbons through the broken trees. Mountains in the distance sagged under the weight of a sky that had begun to shatter—splitting open like glass under a slow, invisible pressure.
Above him, the heavens were not whole.
They bled with light.
Fractures stretched across the sky in long, jagged lines, as if something ancient had taken a chisel to the firmament. Through those rifts, something impossible spilled out—not fire, not storm, but song.
It began soft. Barely a whisper. Just enough to prick at the edge of hearing, like a childhood lullaby remembered in a dream.
Then came the voice—feminine, fragile, distant. It did not echo, yet it filled the world. It did not demand to be heard, yet no soul could turn away.
"When stars forget their silver names,
And moons drift far from flame,
Sing me soft through fire and frost,
Through memories we lost."
A gust of wind stirred the battlefield. Swords half-buried in the soil hummed as if struck by invisible hands. The man didn't move. His eyes, tired and hollow, remained fixed on the horizon, where the song grew stronger—richer—as if it, too, remembered something long forgotten.
"Let silence hold the sky in place,
And tears run slow in space,
But if it breaks, and night must fall,
Then sing to mend it all."
As the final note faded into the cracks above, a second man approached. Slower. Limping. His cloak was torn. Blood dried on his knuckles. But his eyes… they were steady. Focused. Like he had chased this moment across lifetimes.
No words were spoken.
There were none left to say.
The wind paused. The sky wept light.
And somewhere beyond the veil, the girl sang still—her voice now softer than silence, threading through every fracture in the world as if to hold it all together.
For one final moment.