The stone corridors of the Petralca Ministry of Finance were dim even before noon, a stagnant, gloomy air hanging in the passageways. The candle sconces along the walls flickered uneasily, and the scent of damp stone seeped into his cloak. Carlo had been infiltrating this building for several days now, posing as a low-ranking bureaucrat. Using transformation magic, he had taken the form of a human man with short black hair, his indigo eyes the one feature he could not conceal, and spent his days buried under mountains of documents. In his hands now lay a single sheet of parchment. An inquiry record concerning a girl named Serafina, regarding an application for royal patronage. Born in the lower districts of Petralca. No family; raised in an orphanage. The item of particular note: her singing voice. It possessed miraculous powers of healing and pacification, without the use of Lumina crystals as a medium. An annual stipend of three thousand Leve and the provision of housing in the capital's central district had been proposed. Carlo quietly traced the letters, written in a meticulous hand. Her habit of singing at the tip of the breakwater every morning before dawn. Her lack of wariness toward her surroundings, to the point of refusing even a dedicated guard. The text, detailing the target's behavior and vulnerabilities, was a perfect guide for an assassin. To duplicate the parchment, he ran his pen across a thin sheet of paper laid out on the small desk beside him. *No guard.* The moment he transcribed that clinical phrase, his fingertips paused, ever so slightly. The ink formed a tiny blot on the paper. It was information that should have been convenient for the mission. And yet, the intuition of a man born into a family of miners, who had sensed danger on his skin since childhood, processed this string of words as something foreign. Unaware of his own faint disturbance, he encrypted the report in deep-sea squid ink and sent it out on the next current toward Voltida. --- The harbor before dawn was sealed in thick fog. Only the scent of the tide and the distant sound of waves breaking against the shore filled the gray world. Carlo concealed himself in the shadows a dozen meters from the breakwater railing, gripping the hilt of a dagger inside his cloak. The blade was coated with a thin layer of neurotoxin extracted from deep-sea fish. A single scratch was enough to send a target quietly into an eternal sleep. How long had he waited? From beyond the mist came the faint sound of footsteps. Not one person. Two breaths. Carlo narrowed his eyes. Soon the veil of fog wavered, and a girl with pale golden curls half-tied with a ribbon appeared, leading a boy by the hand. Serafina. But she had not come here to sing as she always did. The boy she brought with her was about ten years old. His clothes were soaked through and torn in several places. His small hands, smeared with mud and seaweed, clutched a fragment of a broken mast. The wreckage of a fishing boat from last night's storm. Carlo understood immediately. Serafina crouched down before the boy. The cold morning wind lashed at his wet cheeks. Her blue eyes shimmered with a light that seemed on the verge of tears. "[gentle]That must have been so frightening." That was all. Just those few words. And then she pulled the boy tightly to her chest and began to cry aloud. It was not a melody meant to heal anyone. It was simply an overflowing relief that this child was alive. Her shoulders trembled, and her small sobs were swallowed by the mist. The boy froze at first, startled, but soon buried his face in her shoulder and wept with her. Carlo could not move a single finger. A tremor he had never experienced before ran through the hand gripping the dagger beneath his cloak. To plunge this poisoned blade into the back of this weeping girl. That was his mission. For his people. For Aira's fervent wish. He repeated this to himself over and over. But his feet would not move, as if sewn to the ground. Transparent droplets fell onto the stone paving of the breakwater and shattered. In Meridia's culture, sublimating emotion into song was considered a virtue. To cry without singing was a sign of immaturity, or else—an act permitted only to those who possessed something beyond the framework of song magic. Carlo understood, deep in his bones, that this girl's very existence was something meant to be at someone's side. --- Carlo stood rooted to the spot until the night had fully lifted. Until the boy's mother came running onto the breakwater, her face pale with desperation, and collapsed in tears, embracing her unharmed child—until that moment, Serafina simply held the boy and wept. Her song was never heard, not even once. After the boy and his mother disappeared toward the harbor, only Serafina and Carlo remained on the breakwater. To be precise, Serafina was unaware of Carlo, hidden in the shadows. She stood, wiped her slightly reddened eyes with the back of her hand, offered a small smile nonetheless, and walked away toward the harbor. Carlo slowly drew his dagger. On the blade, the poison still awaiting the morning glistened a murky black. His hand was still trembling. He walked to the railing and thrust the dagger deep into a gap in the stones where the seawater ebbed and flowed. The poison dissolved into the sea, and the morning ripples swallowed it without a sound. --- Evening, in a room at the inn, the Azure Anchor. Carlo sat at a small desk, writing in cipher with deep-sea squid ink. From outside the window came the voices of merchants closing up their market stalls and the murmur spilling from some tavern. As always, he recorded the target's actions, the surrounding circumstances, and his own observations. But when his pen reached the final line, his hand hesitated for several seconds. *The target possesses no aptitude for song magic, poses no threat, and requires continued surveillance.* For thirty years, as the Queen's abyssal messenger, he had submitted reports countless times. None of them had ever contained a falsehood. But now, he was about to write his first lie. Carlo set down his pen and stared at the ciphertext. The candle by the window flickered in the wind, its flame shrinking by a centimeter. To him, that hesitation felt like only a few seconds. It was late into the night when he sent the report out on the next morning's current, down to the seabed. And past midnight. A sudden noise at the window jolted Carlo awake. When he opened the shutter, there was a bundle of parchment clutched in the mouth of a small deep-sea fish. A reply from the Coral Palace. Unfurling the parchment, damp with cold seawater, the encrypted message was a single line. *You are granted seven days until your next report.* It was Aira's handwriting. Cold, efficient, and brief enough to see straight through Carlo's heart. The seven-day deadline was not a mark of trust, but a test. The Queen suspected. Carlo gazed at those seven characters for a long time. Unconsciously, his left hand touched the parchment of his oath, fastened at his hip. *Forget not the pride of our people, and let dialogue be between equals.* His own vow, written in the ancient Meridian tongue, shook him fiercely for the first time in the chasm between duty and conscience. --- The next morning, Luce Plaza. Feigning the continuation of his mission, Carlo listened to her song from the front for the first time. In the semicircular open-air theater facing the harbor, fishermen and their families, elders and children sat as they pleased. Everyone held their breath, gazing at the lone girl standing at the center of the stage. Serafina held no Lumina crystal. She simply clasped her hands before her chest and drew a quiet breath. The melody she eventually spun was, compared to the intricate incantations of the Meridia, technically rough and low in purity. Her voice simply spread out, as if dissolving into the air of the plaza. Carlo saw through it: there was no calculation whatsoever in her song. No strategy, no objective, no distinction between friend and foe. Meridian songs were directed at someone. Aira's songs, especially, carried clear intent and effect. But this girl's song had no target. It could be neither weapon nor shield. And yet, precisely for that reason, it pierced effortlessly through any heart's defenses. Carlo leaned his back against a stone pillar at the edge of the plaza and closed his eyes. Even after the song ended, he could not bring himself to leave. He knew this feeling. That night, when he was still a boy, when he had lost both parents in a mine collapse and wept alone in the dark seabed rubble. A girl had sat there, saying nothing, simply staying by his side. The warmth of that night and the warmth of the voice he was hearing now in this place—Carlo felt they were the same. Serafina finished her song, and the gathered crowd smiled as they headed home. Without anyone asking, she walked over to an exhausted old woman at the corner of the stage and gently took her hand.