Verse at Dawn:
Within the chime of broken stone,
Where the earth remembers each groan,
A silence sings its ancient part,
And loss begins to mend the heart.
Rin stepped beneath the jagged arch, where time clung to the ruins like a second skin. Light filtered through the shattered dome overhead—silver and pale, it touched the dust-laced air as though wary of disturbing what still slumbered. The wind didn't reach this far underground, and yet the faint rhythm of breath lingered, as if the place itself had not yet finished its song.
The ruins whispered. Not in words, but in echoes—sounds from the lives once lived here. Every cracked pillar hummed a different tone. Every fallen statue exhaled history. Rin's bare footsteps became percussion against the shattered flagstones.
He had been walking for hours—following the sound only he could hear. A pulse beneath the silence. A tug within his bones. The shard called him.
He passed under a stone colonnade broken by vines and creeping moss, where symbols of an old Choir etched themselves across his memory. At the far end of the corridor, he saw it: a crystalline structure rising from the earth like a wound frozen in time. Inside, suspended in strands of fractured resonance, glowed a sliver of sound—solidified and burning.
The Shard of the First Rhythm.
His hand reached toward it—hesitation caught in his fingers.
And then—
Lyrical Flashback: The Maestro and the First Choir
The soundscape cracked. Light spilled backward into memory. Not his own. A rhythm far older, carved into the marrow of the world.
He saw them: a ring of twelve, cloaked in breath and music, standing beneath a sky of dusk and thunder. They were the First Choir—the ones who shaped war into waltz and sorrow into harmony. At the center stood the Maestro, clad in no crown but wielding a baton made of living breath.
The Maestro sang—not in words, but in intent. Each movement a verse, each silence a choice.
We held the storm and gave it wings,
Sculpted grief with violins,
Bound the hate and freed the flame,
So silence learned to bear a name.
The Choir sang with him. Not to conquer—but to remember. Each note tore through the sky and mended what history had forgotten. Their sacrifice was not death—it was becoming the rhythm.
But the Maestro—
He broke.
Too much silence. Too much sorrow. In a final act, he poured his essence into a single chord—a shard—hoping that one day, one soul might hear the buried song.
And remember.
Present
Rin's breath stilled as the vision faded. He fell to one knee.
Tears met stone.
He understood now. The shard wasn't just power—it was a memory made manifest. A legacy of sacrifice. A voice waiting to be sung again.
He placed his hand on the crystalline tomb. The structure pulsed once, then shattered without sound. The shard floated into his palm—warm, trembling, familiar.
And then the ruins sang.
Every wall, every statue, every broken rhythm joined in a lament so old it bowed the air. And Rin—he did not resist. He let the shard anchor within his spirit.
The Undersong accepted him.
He rose not as a child wandering echoes, but as a vessel bearing their memory.
The ruins quieted.
And in the silence, Rin turned. For now, he did not walk alone. The rhythm moved with him.
Verse at Dusk:
And from the choir, one remained,
To walk where grief and song were chained,
Until the breathless chord could ring,
And teach the blade once more to sing.