The Forgotten Opera wept music in dreams.
Its walls, carved from symphonic marble, seemed to hum as Crystal and Liora stepped beyond the main hall, deeper into the belly of the building. Each footfall echoed with the ghosts of applause. Velvet dust rose from torn curtains. The chandeliers overhead swayed gently...not from wind, but from memory.
Crystal followed the glowing shimmer of Liora's threads. The marionette moved like a melody with legs...graceful, drifting, barely touching the ground.
"I remember this hall," Liora whispered, glancing at a collapsed gallery of puppet wardrobes. "Here, I learned to shape breath into beauty. To make sadness sing."
Crystal paused beside a broken conductor's baton.
"And here," Liora continued, "was where I was silenced."
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They reached the Chamber of Songglass, a circular vault hidden beneath the stage, once sealed by harmony and opened only by music. Now, the protective spell was shattered. The doors hung ajar, weeping threads of forgotten sound.
Liora stepped forward, trembling.
"The Songglass... it's still here."
In the center of the chamber stood a crystalline pillar, fractured but pulsing faintly with inner light. Embedded within it were remnants of melody...not songs, but memories of them. Emotions trapped in crystal.
"Each one of us once stored our voice here," Liora said. "Every performer in the Opera. It was our heart."
Crystal approached it, her palm brushing the surface. The glass sang—a soft, sorrowful vibration that made her vision blur.
She saw moments.
Liora dancing before an audience of thousands. A young boy laughing as he played the flute. A violinist crying into his strings during a final performance. Joy. Grief. Loss. All encoded in frozen resonance.
"This is what Nocturne tried to erase," Crystal murmured. "He wasn't just after silence. He wanted to erase the memory of music itself."
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But the moment shattered.
The chamber trembled. The glass pulsed...not with song, but with warning.
Then...a crack split the wall.
Shadow spilled in like ink from a spilled inkwell, and from it, rose three figures cloaked in gray tattered robes. Their faces were voids. Their hands were bound in strings of silence. Instruments hung broken at their sides.
The Forsaken Choir.
Liora recoiled, her strings snapping into a protective arc. "They were singers once. But when their voices were stolen, they became Nocturne's heralds."
One figure opened its mouth. No sound emerged...only a low-pressure hum, like a vacuum of joy. The Songglass dimmed, trying to protect itself.
"They erase memory," Crystal gasped.
"They're drawn to voices," Liora added, lifting her hand. "Let them hear mine."
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And then, she sang.
Her voice was crystalline and trembling at first, like porcelain stitched with light...but it bloomed into power. The golden strings around her formed wings, slicing through the air. The chamber lit with echoes.
Crystal stepped beside her and joined in.
A duet of rebirth. Of sorrow unforgotten.
Their harmonies twined around the shadows, disrupting the stillness. The Forsaken Choir screamed...silent, horrible...and fled into the stone like mist retreating from fire.
Silence returned, but this time, it was the peaceful kind. The sacred pause between verses.
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Crystal knelt beside Liora, whose hands now glowed with fractured light. "You've kept your voice hidden a long time."
"I waited for someone who would hear it," Liora replied softly.
Crystal touched the Songglass again. It was glowing brighter now. It recognized them both. It remembered.
"We'll awaken them all," Crystal whispered. "One song at a time."
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Far beneath the Opera, in the buried sanctuary once known as the Hall of the Broken Baton, a silent figure stood beside a shattered piano.
Nocturne's fingers curled slowly around a bow of bone and silence.
"They sing again…" he whispered. "Then let the next verse… be despair."
Next Chapter: "The First Seal"