Chapter 104: Mirrors of the Heart
In a world gilded by wealth but ruled by silence, a child's heart learns to speak in verses and melodies — tender and aching, where love is not declared, but composed. Time doesn't pass the same way for her. It lingers. It aches. It deepens. Each day is a sonata, each gaze a stanza, and each touch an echo of something unspoken yet undeniable.
She is small, but her devotion is enormous —sacred, theatrical, absolute. What once fluttered as playful affection now blooms as something more reverent, more poetic. Not yet a lover, but no longer just a friend. The rituals begin to change: tea at the same hour, hair ribbons matched, sonnets handwritten in the margins of science textbooks. Her fingers memorize the keys of the piano not to perform — but to confess.
It is music that becomes her love language. First with the piano. Then the violin. And then her voice—sweet, haunting, ancient-sounding despite her youth. She sings in an old tongue, her eyes closed, because the one she sings for lives in her heart, not in the room. The melodies ache with beauty, as if longing were her first language and joy a second learned in secret.
But it is in the quiet moments — the brush of a thumb against a cheek, the soft plea for reassurance, the whispered declarations beneath wool blankets — that her yearning becomes too large for even poetry to hold.
"I love you more," she always says.
And if the answer is anything less than forever, she wilts.
A storm is coming — not from the sky, but from the intensity of a feeling that has nowhere safe to go. She does not yet know how to protect what she feels. Only that it consumes her. And that she would write a thousand elegies to be loved in return.