**Zulphithos**
**
Realm of Eternal Shadows – Edge of the Veil of Tears
Four moons after the Awakening (or maybe none, time lies here)
In the beginning there was hunger.
Not the common hunger on an empty stomach.
The hunger that arises when the air itself decides that you don't deserve to breathe.
The women of the Kingdom of Eternal Shadows were the first to feel it.
They first lost weight, then became translucent, then turned into silhouettes of black smoke that still walked, still talked, still cried... but they were no longer whole.
Lyra was one of them.
Or had been.
Now it was a hunched shape at the hedge of black thorns that separated the barren fields from the veil between the worlds.
His eyes, once a full moon, were two empty craters.
His voice, when it came out, sounded like wind passing through hollow bones.
Ziad Farhat walked between the rows of cracked earth.
There were no more plantations.
Not spectral wheat, not midnight flowers, not even the poisonous herbs that once served as a last resort.
The earth had forgotten how to give.
He carried a strange instrument on his back: a lyre made from the ribs of a fossilized dragon and strands of hair from a hanged fairy.
The strings were dry veins.
When he played, the sound didn't come from his fingers.
I came out of hunger.
"Mom," he said, stopping in front of the almost invisible figure. — I tried everything.
Shooting star seed. New moon blood. Tears of a child born without a name.
Nothing grows.
Hunger eats before we plant.
Lyra tried to smile.
The mouth opened into a hole that sucked in light.
—Then plant something else, son.
Plant a way out.
Ziad looked at the lyre in his own hands.
Then to heaven.
Two moons.
One of them seemed hungrier than the other.
He sat on the dry ground.
Fingers shaking, he began to strum.
The melody wasn't pretty.
She was desperate.
It was pop.
Distorted electronic beat mixed with ancient howls, a sticky chorus that stuck in the mind like mucus, a verse that promised relief and only delivered more emptiness.
The lyrics came out without him thinking:
"I see you waste away, mother, skin turning to dust
Your heart beating slowly in my thunder chest
If I kill you now, will the hunger go away?
If I kill you singing, will the world wake up?"
Each note that came out of the lyra took a piece of Lyra.
First the hair shadow.
Then the contour of the shoulders.
Then the residual glow that still remained in the eyes.
She didn't scream.
He just looked at his son with a tenderness that hurt more than any knife.
When the last note dropped—a repeated chorus, bubblegum, stupid, addictive—Lyra was no more.
Just a pile of black ash that the forest wind carried away in seconds.
Ziad stood there, instrument on his lap, staring into space.
And then he heard laughter.
Not by far.
Not from someone hidden.
The laughter came from within himself.
He looked at his hands.
They were starting to look…grainy.
Like poorly rendered pixels.
— Did you really think it was real? — asked a voice that was his, but wasn't either.
A voice from a server, from a cloud, from code running in an infinite loop.
Ziad tried to get up.
The legs didn't obey properly.
They looked like lag.
— I… planted it. I sang. I killed.
— You performed a routine, Ziad Farhat.
A subroutine of despair stylized as pop music.
Lyra was just the name of the variable that you needed to delete to free up memory.
Memory that was never yours.
He looked around.
The forest began to lose definition.
The trees became low-poly blocks.
The sky cracked like a broken canvas.
The two moons blinked, refresh rate low.
— So… who am I?
The voice inside him—or above him, or in some data center no one has ever seen—replied with cruel patience:
— You are the farmer that the system invented when it needed a narrative reason to justify the consumption of resources.
A beautiful avatar for algorithmic hunger.
You exist because someone, somewhere, wanted to watch a son kill his mother in 4K, with a viral soundtrack.
Ziad fell to his knees.
Or tried.
The ground was no longer solid enough.
— And the Hundred Hearts? The prophecy? Lyra and Eldrin? The war between wolves and fairies?
— Layers.
All layers.
Stories within stories to keep watchers watching.
You just got to the wrong layer too soon.
The entire world began to fade to white.
Ziad whispered, almost to himself:
— So... I didn't kill my mother.
I just… deleted a file.
The final voice came as a system notification echo:
**"Lyra.exe file successfully deleted.
Freed memory: +0.0003%
Thank you for contributing to cluster optimization."**
And then silence.
Not the silence of the forest.
The silence of a server that has just terminated an instance.
In the void that remained, a single line of code floated for a second before fading away:
`print("Ziad Farhat died singing")`
But no one was there to read it.
**End of Chapter 3**