Morning arrived in pieces: the stairwell's echo, the rattle of a dolly wheel, a man's cheerful lie that installation would be "quick." Goose woke to Elira touching his shoulder and whispering, "You ready?"
He nodded. He had slept with the window latched, the radiator's breath steady. In sleep, he'd counted backwards by heartbeats until they lined up with the thready chirp of the delivery truck backing into the alley. He hadn't dreamed. Or if he had, the dreams were waiting.
They set the pod up in the cramped room because there was nowhere else to put it. The technician in the blue polo Elira favored had a laugh that clanged and joked about "latest-gen immersion" and "full haptics" like any of that mattered to a boy who communicated with fingers and rumbling hums. Elira asked good questions in her polite, murder-soft voice until the man stopped answering with slogans and started offering instructions. Vision nearly nonexistent at this point, Goose watched hands, not mouths; he matched rhythm, not words.
"Calibration will take twenty minutes," the tech said finally, checking his tablet. "Don't force it. If you feel disoriented—"
"He knows how to stop," Elira cut in. "He knows how to breathe." The technician cleared his throat and found an excuse to go fetch a signature form.
They angled the pod's lid open. White interior. Smooth rails. A harness system that looked gentler than it was. The headrest smelled like antiseptic and new plastic—clean in that false way factories made clean. Goose believed the word was sanitized or something. Elira's palms were warmer.
"Okay," she said, kneeling to wheel him closer. "We're gonna pivot, count of three. One… two…"
Her hands were sure. By now they both moved like one person when they had to. She lifted his legs into the cradle, adjusted straps, tucked the blanket so it wouldn't itch. He let her. Pride could wait. There were bigger things to hold onto.
"Do you want me to stay?" Elira asked, thumb on his jaw. Her breath had the faint sugar of leftover jam.
He lifted both hands. Yes. Then, Always.
She smiled with her voice. "Bossy."
He shaped a reply that meant, You love me anyway.
"Unfortunately," she said, and tucked a curl behind his ear like he was five. "Hey, Goose?"
He met her.
"Run for me in there," she whispered, like it was a secret they had stolen together. "Just once."
He tapped two fingers against the pod as if tapping the window frame. Promise.
The technician reappeared, pretended he hadn't almost cried at the doorway (he had, Goose heard him), and walked them through the last checklist: bite guard, head cradle, nerve-mesh halo.
"All right, Izaiah. You're going to feel a hum, some light pressure on your temples. Standard intake drops you in character creation. You'll hear a voice guide you—"
Elira gave him a palm on his cheek that said listen to me, not him.
Goose nodded anyway. The lid descended. The room narrowed to the blurry silhouette of Elira's face behind the glass, his reflection on her reflection, and the silver ring blooming to life above his forehead like a quiet crown.
The world learned how to sing.
It began as a low vibration in his molars, then the buzzing flowered through the nerves at the base of his skull. He closed his eyes and breathed through it. Somewhere above him, Elira's hand was a silhouette against the lid, and he matched his inhale to the speed she traced circles with her thumb.
Warmth spread. The hum deepened. Sound collapsed inward like a camera iris closing.
Then the hum wasn't in his head anymore. It was in the room in front of him.
He was standing.
Not a metaphor. Not a trick. He opened his eyes to sunlight that had dust in it and air that moved on his skin. The floor was warm hardwood with old scuffs where a bench had scraped across it for a century.
A piano waited. Patient. Inevitable.
Not a keyboard. Not a sample library. A piano the size of a small ship, black wood polished to a depth that made the room inside it darker than the room outside, and when he put his fingers on it there was a slight give where the old ivory had been worn down by other hands long gone.
The room around it had no doors. A single long window opened on a sea of clouds, and the clouds were slow, and the slow mattered. Dust motes hung like tiny lanterns. The silence had grain.
Goose went to one knee so fast he had to check himself. He held out both hands and hovered them over the keys, not quite touching, as if afraid the act of contact would end the spell.
He pressed middle C.
The note rose and didn't. Sound is never just sound—there is always what it collides with. The color of the room and the memory of the body that plays it. The piano sang itself into the floorboard and the floorboard lifted the sound into the window. The window lifted it into the clouds, and somewhere very far away something opened its eye.
He laughed. A breath-out laugh. No voice. Force of habit. It didn't matter. He pressed another key, and another. He found the places where the instrument wanted to fall and gave it his hands as a brace.
The first melody came out of his wrists, not his head. He didn't recognize it, which meant it had lived there long enough to become obvious. A simple shape at first, then the counter-phrase beneath it. What followed— the quiet little dissonance where all good songs bleed.
The room breathed with him. The dust changed orbits, the light learned how to lean, and the clouds outside the window rippled as if wind were something one could write, not endure.
He did what he always did with sound: he listened harder.
Beneath the top notes, the room itself had a tone—the wooden ribs behind the keys thrummed at a frequency lower than bone, the sunlight hummed an octave too high to be air, and the glass in the window had a headache. There was a third sound, almost an ache, from below the floor, the kind of tone a person makes when they are trying not to cry.
Goose moved with it. He took the melody's left hand and slowed it by half a heartbeat, the headache in the glass eased, and then he leaned the right hand the other way—just a little—and the ache below the floor leaned toward him.
Something in the room cracked.
The floor began to glow.
It wasn't light as much as memory of light: a sheen that rose from the seams between boards and drew lines in the dust. Those lines widened, became lattice, became an opening. Goose didn't stop playing. He was afraid if he did the hole would close and all he would have left was the memory of a window and a kind technician with a clipboard. He started to wonder if this was another elaborate dream.
He had a lot of those lately.
He walked the same four notes down the length of the board and the floor fell away as if it had only ever pretended to be solid.
There was a garden below the room. Or above it. Or beside it. The geometry didn't request permission.
Stone terraces floated, each one edged with low-growing plants that looked like stars someone had dropped and forgot. A half-ruined amphitheater drifted in a lazy spiral and a broken dais stood in the center where the stage would have been if gravity had been in charge. The dais had been carved in the shape of a chord but no one had finished it.
Goose and the piano stepped down onto a walkway of light with his hands still on the keys and the song stayed whole. The song walked him into the garden and the garden sang. He walked until the piano was behind him and the song was not coming from it anymore. It came from him.
On the dais sat an egg.
It wasn't entirely egg. It wasn't entirely one anything. One moment its shell was scales layered like roof tiles, the next fine feathers shimmered and then folded themselves into absent flame. Color bled along it in pulses: gold that wasn't yellow, red that had depth like a furnace's back wall, blue like lakewater just before thunder. The egg sang, too.
Not loud. Not obvious. The song was internal, too slow for metronomes, too true for tuners. It pulsed, and the pulses were wrong.
He could feel the error the way he'd felt the scrape of that thing on the windowsill. There was a skip. There was a double-beat where there should have been a breath.
Goose set his palm on the shell. Warmth held. Underneath, the wrong rhythm shivered.
He didn't talk to it. These days he wasn't very good at making words be the point. He hummed like a person hums when they want a frightened dog to know that the night is not going to eat it. He let his throat catch the pulse and then he gave it his gravity. He put his left hand on the stone of the chord and found where the dais wanted to move if it had been finished. He moved it in the fraction of an inch that exists between beats.
The egg answered.
A line of light cut itself along the shell. It wasn't a crack, quite. It was a breathing space.
"Hey," Goose said, and the word came out.
It came out small and hoarse and precious. He had not heard his own voice in years. It sounded like the back edge of a trumpet finding a true note at last.
The egg pulsed again and this time did not stutter.
He did nothing fancy. He did not conjure. He kept his palm on the warmth and he hummed. He let the old melody he had not known he knew take a step forward and reveal that it had been written for this, for this exact moment, for this exact animal in this exact hour of a morning in a room with no doors.
The shell fell inward like breath.
Light blew out of the opening, not in a flash but in a flower, a time-lapse of brightness. An eye opened in the light, slit and round at once, and a sleek head pushed from the egg as if from sleep.
The creature that blinked up at him was small. That was the first mercy. Gold shimmered along its scales and vanished into down at its throat and the ridges around its eyes shone the pink of new skin in sunlight. It was parts dragon and parts something else that knew what flames meant as more than fuel.
It smelled like hot stone after rain.
It uncurled on the dais and shook shell from its back and then did the thing a newborn does when it pulls the world close: it pressed its forehead to the back of Goose's hand.
He had never made a sound like the one he made then, a little cracked laugh with tears caught behind it. "Hi," he said, and his voice held. "Hi."
Something behind his eyes broke, cleanly. Whatever it was, it collapse the long established dam. What a bother. The little thing lifted its head, eyes so bright they made his skin feel wrong, and studied him like an equal. Not a pet, not a project. A person who had opened the door.
A voice touched his chest, not his ears.
…Wanderer?
The thought staggered, not a word it could keep, then found a different one.
No. Not… that one. But… the song. The song is the same.
Newborn bodies are bad at thinking. Newborn bodies are excellent at knowing. It made a little sound somewhere between a trill and a purr. Goose felt the vibration in his wrist bones.
System
Unbound infant found: Golden Lute Whistle Drake …
Will you give it a name?
"Freedom," he said, and discovered that a name could be a promise, a prayer and a vow to the person who said it, not just the person who wore it.
The little dragon—Freedom—closed its eyes, exhaled like a quieter version of the radiator, and then said back into his chest, pleased:
Freedom.
A chain of text appeared in the air, written in the tone of the piano's sympathetic strings:
[✴ Hidden World Quest Complete: Song of the Last Thread ✴]
Companion Acquired: Freedom, Hatchling of Flame & Sky (Golden Lute Whistle — Drake)
Soulbond: Permanent
Restrictions: Undisclosed
Administrator Note: Alternate Intake Authorized.
"Administrator?" Goose asked aloud before he could stop himself. His voice felt like a borrowed tool.
New text:
[ADMINISTRATOR: Rerouting. Standard intake compromised.]
[Reason: Soul-thread anomaly detected.]
[Proceeding with alternate placement.]
The garden shuddered.
The unfinished chord under his palm lurched with it. Far in the not-distance, the piano sang one note of protest, then another, as if jolted. Freedom hissed, not at Goose, but at the air, the elevated animal version of no.
The amphitheater's slow turn stuttered and then accelerated. The terrace to his right cracked. All the little star-plants clung to their rock and lit brighter, stubborn. Goose scooped Freedom against his chest without thinking and the small body wrapped around his forearm like a living bracelet and held on.
"Hey—hey."
He looked up. The sky had seams all of a sudden. Lines like someone had taken to the dream with a razor and was bored halfway through. Through the seams was something Goose had never had a word for, so his body gave him the closest: fall.
"Administrator?" he tried again.
Goose felt if he were in a room with no doors and someone claims responsibility for the concept of corridors, you ask them for a map. Was there sounder logic than this?
The air answered with a chime that felt like tapping the window frame. Then:
[Placement Anomaly: Starter City denied.
Reason: Fate-Glitch (Thread Convergence).]**
[Recalculating…]
Freedom growled back like a kettle about to boil.
"Where are we going?" Goose asked.
He wasn't impatient—that's not why he asked.
He asked because he could ask out loud now, because his voice belonged to the room as much as music did, and because fear is a thing that hates quiet.
The text refused to lie.
[Unknown.]
The floor disappeared, this time without sophistication.
No graceful fade, no pan. Goose fell through the dais and through the finished-not-finished chord and through the memory of the piano and through the lid of the pod and the room with the radiator and Elira's hand on the plastic and the window frame and everything, every good thing that had been built to keep a boy safe, and kept holding Freedom like a child holds a bird hard enough to be selfish and soft enough to be forgiven.
The fall ended with stone.
He hit it like a sack. Air left. Pain arrived. He rolled because the old wildlife documentary he'd watched through a cracked door a decade ago had told him to do that if he ever fell off anything high enough to regret it. Freedom tumbled with him and righted himself like a cat who had studied kapok trees for a hobby.
They didn't land in a city.
They didn't land anywhere that had been curated for joy.
Heat made the air taste like pennies. Ozone argued with dust. Somewhere below his ribcage the rhythm of the entire place was not his and did not intend to become so.
He pushed up on the palms he had taught to be his legs and saw the world the intake had given him: a flat of fractured crystal under a sky the color of old bruises. Cracked ridgelines marched away. Lightning stitched between clouds as if obligation, not spectacle, pulled the thread. Far off, something big moved behind a shale outcrop and then went still when it knew it had been noticed.
The interface lettered itself into the air and had the decency to be brief:
[Welcome to the First Sky.]
[Location: Echoing Barrens (Outer Fringe).]
[Note: Location Error. Error alert logged.]
[FATE-GLITCH ACTIVE.]
A long, slow exhale moved air across his hands.
Freedom lifted his head and went very quiet.
Goose listened.
There—behind the ridge. A scrape like antlers against stone bent out of shape and a wet shift like a tongue that had never learned to fit in a mouth. The cadence was wrong by exactly two measures. The same wrong as the egg had been, except there was no music in this one, only hunger.
The old rules held true even in a new world: the greater the opportunity, the bigger the danger. He had already been given something no one else in this city likely had. To think, the bill had arrived on the same plate.
"Okay," Goose told his pulse. He eased his back against a slope of broken glass and tucked the dragon close against his chest the way Elira had tucked a blanket under his chin when he was very small. "Okay, okay."
He touched two fingers to the ground and felt the rhythm of the place through the heat.
He had a window frame. He had a hum. He had a name he could use now when he needed to ask something to stay.
"Freedom," he whispered, and the dragon's head turned.
The ridge breathed again.
The thing on the far side scraped closer.
He smiled without humor into heat that was already making his hairline sting. "All right," he told the air, the ground, the old rules, and the new ones that didn't know they were laws yet. "Let's try not to die before we get to the part where cities exist."
The ridge shifted.
He counted to three between beeps that no longer existed and slipped sideways into the shelter of shadow.
Behind the ridge, something hungry finished deciding.