"What sings in silence?
What dances in ruin?
A blade that remembers,
Even when its wielder forgets."
Rin didn't remember collapsing.
But he remembered waking—not with his body, but with his rhythm.
His ears were bleeding. Not from pain. From too much truth.
The Beat Untouched pulsed around him in low, sorrowful waves. It wasn't sound in the way the world understood. It was a pressure behind the heart, a tug at the lungs, a hush that begged for attention yet demanded reverence. The deeper he breathed, the more he realized—
It was weeping.
The rhythm wept. For what was lost. For what was once sung by a thousand voices now gone.
"We were the first," it cried, not in language, but in the broken vibration of half-formed music.
"We did not fall. We were shattered."
He looked down at the ground, which was not stone, but sheet music long decayed, scattered with shattered strings and bones carved into tuning forks. The floor beneath him vibrated—not to welcome, but to warn.
And yet…
His blade sang.
Not in triumph, but in harmony. A low, reverent note. A hum that rose in recognition.
Rin drew it slowly—his hand trembling as the steel resonated. The sound was faint, like a heartbeat in a storm, but steady. Familiar.
And from the dark came a figure.
She was shaped like a person but woven from notes. Every step she took disrupted the remnants of rhythm beneath them, her presence gliding like the verse of a forgotten lullaby.
Her eyes were closed. Her body flickered like sheet music exposed to fire. She spoke without sound, and yet he heard her clearer than thunder:
"You are not the First."
"But you are not blind."
"Will you break, like we did?"
He could barely speak. His mouth moved, but his voice was still tangled in the weeping rhythm. Instead, Rin bowed—not as warrior, but as student. As orphan. As listener.
"Then listen," she said.
"Listen to what the Blade remembers."
She raised her hand. The world fell away.
🎼 Memory Interlude: The Blade's Lament
"I was born in a song no longer sung.
Forged not in fire, but in a mother's scream.
I was held in hands that bled and prayed—
Passed from sorrow to sorrow,
Each time forgetting, each time remembering anew."
He saw it all.
The First Blade—his blade—was not forged, but gathered. From chords of grief, from cries of the dying, from the silence of kings who'd forgotten how to listen. Each wielder gave it a memory. Each death imprinted a verse.
And now, it remembered Rin.
Not just for who he was, but for who he would become.
Back in the present, the spectral figure touched his chest.
He gasped as light and song collided inside him. The sorrow of the Undersong flooded him, but so did something else—
A rhythm that could not be broken. A rhythm that danced even in death.
The Beat Untouched… accepted him.
Not as its master.
But as its voice.
Ending Verse of the Chapter:
"One cannot wield what one cannot mourn.
The song you seek is born in scorn.
Rise, young rhythm, forged in pain—
Your blade remembers. Let it reign."