The girl with the question—her name was Aeryn. She was small, quiet, but sharp-eyed. She'd grown up in a town built atop the ruins of a forgotten citadel, one where the wind sometimes hummed lullabies through cracks in the stone. Her mother was a mapkeeper, and her father had vanished when she was four. All Aeryn had of him was a weathered locket and a lullaby she never remembered learning.
She didn't know why she cared so much about the Eclipsed Choir, but the idea of them haunted her—young people stepping into a broken world not to rule it or save it, but to sing something true into it. She read everything she could. Pieced together their movements, studied ancient harmonics, and chased every tale of resonance—no matter how small.
