The world ended on a Tuesday.
Ora would remember this even as other memories dissolved: Tuesday, when apprentice mages practiced their scales and the air hummed with possibility.
She had been bored.
This, too, she would remember—the specific weight of that boredom. Sixteen years in Crysillia, jewel of the Southern Reaches and most perfect of the Nine Kingdom capitals, and she had been *bored*. While her younger sister Lyra attended her lessons with the devotion of a zealot (and that's what she was, really, fourteen years old and already more in love with the Crystal Song than with life itself), Ora had slipped away to the Hanging Gardens.
The gardens floated on pure harmonics—platforms that chimed different notes as you crossed them, an eternal symphony that made your teeth ache. Ora lay in the grass of the third platform, the one tuned to E minor, barefoot and rebellious by Crysillia's standards.
Above her, the sky was that particular shade of blue that only existed here—not natural but *perfected*, refined through three thousand years of magical evolution until real sky looked shabby by comparison.
She'd been thinking about Theron again. Her grandfather, dead six months now from what the healers called "soul fatigue"—basically, he'd lived too long and magic couldn't hold him together anymore. Everyone said she had his eyes: pale green like spring water, too knowing for their age.
"You see too much, little star," he'd told her the week before he died. They'd been sitting in his study, surrounded by books that sang soft lullabies when opened. "Sometimes the gift of Vital Echo is more curse than blessing."
"I don't want to see anymore," she'd whispered, because at sixteen she could feel the life ebbing from everyone around her. The slow fade of the elderly, the bright burn of children, the steady glow of adults in their prime. It never stopped. Even with her eyes closed, she could map every living thing within half a mile.
"Then learn to look deeper," Theron had said. "Don't just see the light—see what feeds it. Purpose, love, hope, rage. The emotions that keep souls anchored to flesh."
She'd tried. Gods, she'd tried. But all she felt was the terrible weight of other people's mortality pressing against her consciousness like a flood trying to break through a dam.
The memory fractured as something wrong touched the edge of her perception. Her Vital Echo—usually a gentle warmth that let her sense living things—suddenly screamed warnings. Every animal within miles was panicking.
The Hanging Gardens floated—because of course they did. Everything in Crysillia either floated, sang, or did both simultaneously. Platforms of living crystal suspended by harmonics so pure they made your teeth ache, connected by bridges that chimed different notes as you crossed them. C major. F sharp. B flat. A symphony of structure that never, ever stopped.
Ora lay on her back in the soft grass of the third platform, the one tuned to E minor because some long-dead architect had thought melancholy needed a physical space. The old songs claimed the world began with an argument—two forces that couldn't coexist learning to create coexistence itself. E minor was supposedly the key of that first disagreement.
She had taken off her shoes. This was rebellion, by Crysillia standards. Bare feet on grass introduced variables. Chaos. Disorder.
The grass felt wonderful between her toes—though cooler than it should be. Everything around her always was, these days. Three degrees below what others felt, as if she carried her own private winter. Master Solandis said it was just her imagination. But thermometers didn't lie, and neither did the way people unconsciously stepped away from her in crowded spaces, seeking warmth she couldn't provide.
"You're going to get caught," she told herself, but her voice lacked conviction. Who would catch her? Master Solandis was leading meditations in the Tower of First Light. Her parents were attending some council meeting about trade harmonics with the Northern Kingdoms. And Lyra...
Lyra was where she was supposed to be, doing what she was supposed to do, being the perfect daughter Ora had never quite managed to become.
A butterfly landed on her knee. Its wings were crystalline, literally—another of Crysillia's improvements on nature. When it flew, it left trails of light in the air that lasted exactly 3.7 seconds before fading. Someone had done the math. Someone always did the math in Crysillia.
Ora reached out with her Vital Echo, the gift she'd been born with that made her valuable enough to train despite her consistent lack of enthusiasm. The butterfly's life force was a tiny spark, simpler than human consciousness but still *there*, still real. She could feel its minuscule desires: warmth, nectar, a safe place to rest. So small. So pure.
She envied it.
The butterfly took flight, and Ora watched its light trail spell temporary messages in the air. Random patterns that meant nothing but looked like they should. Like most things in Crysillia.
That's when the insects stopped singing.
Not all at once. First the crickets in the eastern quarter of the garden cut off mid-chirp. Then the dragonflies stopped their humming near the fountain. The bees fell silent. Within seconds, the omnipresent insect orchestra that provided the undergrowth of Crysillia's eternal symphony just... stopped.
Ora sat up, grass stains on her white apprentice robes. (Another rebellion. Another variable.)
The birds followed. The songbirds in their crystal cages, the wild sparrows that nested in the garden's corners, the peacocks that strutted across the lower platforms—all of them stopped singing at once.
In a city built on sound, the absence of it was deafening.
Ora stood, her bare feet finding purchase on grass that suddenly felt too sharp, too real. Her Vital Echo expanded instinctively, reaching out to understand what had changed. The life forces around her were still there but they were... wrong. Clenched. Like every living thing was holding its breath.
She looked up.
The perfect blue sky had a crack in it.
Not a cloud. Not a distortion. A crack, as if the sky were painted on glass and someone had taken a hammer to it. Black showed through the crack—not the black of night or storm clouds, but the black of absence. The black of things that should not be.
The crack widened.
And then the dragons came through.
The first one was white as winter death, so vast that Ora's mind simply refused to process its size. Her brain kept trying to insist it was closer than it actually was because the alternative—that something that large could exist and move with such terrible grace—broke too many fundamental assumptions about reality.
Its wings didn't beat so much as *remake* the air around them. Each movement created harmonics that shouldn't exist, sounds that the Crystal Song said were impossible. Discord made manifest.
Behind the white dragon came others. Red like old blood. Black like the spaces between stars. Gold like the last sunset. Blue like the deep ocean where light goes to die. They poured through the crack in the sky like water through a broken dam, and as they came, they *sang*.
It was not beautiful.
The dragons' song was the opposite of everything Crysillia represented. Where the Crystal Song sought harmony, this was cacophony. Where the city pursued perfection, this was raw, primal, *wrong*. It was the sound of grief so pure it had fermented into rage. It was the sound of love twisted into loss. It was the sound of justice perverted into vengeance.
Ora ran.
Her bare feet slapped against crystal bridges as she sprinted toward the Academy. Toward Lyra. The dragons' song followed her, preceded her, surrounded her. Windows began to shatter—not crack, but shatter, exploding into dust that sang its own death knell as it fell.
The first tower fell when she was halfway there.
The Tower of Endless Refraction, which had stood for eight hundred years, simply... ceased. The dragons' song hit its resonance frequency and it collapsed into itself, all that carefully tuned crystal trying to occupy the same space at the same time. The sound it made was like the world screaming.
*Glass breaking. Not physical glass—something deeper. The sound of truth shattering.*
People were screaming too, but their voices were lost in the catastrophe. Through the chaos, Ora glimpsed faces she knew—teachers, students, merchants. An old man she recognized as a Master of the Third Harmony stood frozen in the street, his mouth open in a perfect O of surprise as his body transformed into crystal statue, his last breath crystallizing in his lungs.
She kept running.
The Academy was three kilometers from the Hanging Gardens. Ora had never run three kilometers in her life. She ran them now in minutes that felt like hours that felt like seconds. Time had become negotiable. The dragons' song was rewriting the rules.
She could see the Academy's main spire ahead, still standing, still perfect. The crystal dome where Lyra took her lessons gleamed in the afternoon sun like a promise.
The red dragon hit it with fire that wasn't fire.
It was entropy given form. The heat death of the universe compressed into a single breath. The dome didn't melt—it *sublimated*, going from solid to gas without bothering to be liquid first.
Ora's Vital Echo felt them die. Dozens of lights snuffed out between one heartbeat and the next. She felt their confusion, their terror, their—
Lyra.
She felt Lyra.
Her sister's life force was distinctive, familiar as her own heartbeat. Still alive. Still *there*. Third floor, western classroom, the one where they studied Ancient Harmonics.
Ora hit the Academy's main doors at full speed. They were already cracked, spider webs of damage spreading from where the building's harmony had been disrupted. She squeezed through, crystal shards tearing her robes, her skin.
The inside was chaos. Students and teachers running in every direction, some trying to maintain the Harmony, others abandoning centuries of training to panic like the animals they'd always been underneath the crystal perfection.
The stairs were crumbling. Ora took them three at a time, sometimes jumping gaps where entire sections had already fallen away. Second floor. A wall exploded inward, showering her with fragments that sang funeral dirges. She kept climbing.
Third floor. The western corridor was intact, impossibly. Like the eye of a storm, this one section of the Academy maintained its perfection while everything around it died.
Ora burst into the Ancient Harmonics classroom.
Lyra was there. Alive. Standing with eight other students in a perfect circle, their voices raised in harmony, maintaining a bubble of stable reality through pure will and training.
"Lyra!" Ora screamed, but her voice was swallowed by the dragons' song.
Her sister's eyes were closed, her fourteen-year-old face serene with concentration. She was beautiful in that moment, Ora thought with the clarity that comes when the world is ending. Beautiful and brave and doomed.
The ceiling began to crack.
Ora lunged forward, Vital Echo reaching out to grab her sister's life force, to pull her away, to save her, to—
The ceiling fell.
Not all at once. Time did that negotiable thing again, stretching like taffy. Ora saw each chunk of crystal separate from the whole, saw them begin their descent, saw the precise trajectory that would bring them down on the circle of students who were still singing, still trying to save a world that was already dead.
She was two meters away. Then one. Her hand stretched out, fingers reaching for Lyra's robe.
The largest chunk of crystal, sharp as betrayal, fell directly onto the circle.
The harmony broke.
*GLASS BREAKING.*
The sound wasn't just physical—it was metaphysical. Every shattered promise, every broken truth, every fractured reality compressed into one terrible note. Ora felt something fundamental snap inside her, like a string that had been holding her humanity in tune.
The students scattered—no, they *shattered*. The disruption of their circle created a feedback loop that turned their bodies into crystalline statues for one perfect moment before the falling debris smashed them into powder.
Ora's fingers brushed Lyra's robe as her sister became light.
Not crystal. Not powder. Light. Pure, brilliant, impossible light that seared itself into Ora's retinas and her memory and her soul. For one moment, Lyra was transformed into the very essence of the Crystal Song, become one with the harmony she'd studied so devotedly.
Then she was gone.
Only the echo remained—crystalline laughter, Lyra's laughter, hanging in the air like a ghost of joy.
The temperature around Ora plummeted. Four degrees below normal now. The beginning of her eternal winter.
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*End Chapter 1*
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