The elders of the Cinderwell were a peculiar bunch.

  Kael had expected solemnity—hushed voices, bowed heads, the kind of reverence reserved for graves and gods. Instead, he found himself perched on a wobbly stool in the center of a crumbling amphitheater, surrounded by a dozen old men and women who argued like drunkards over the last scrap of meat at a feast.

  “Your version is too slow,” snapped Elder Harkin, a gaunt man with fingers like knotted rope. “The lullaby was meant to dance.”

  “Dance?” Elder Yara scoffed, tapping her cane against the stone floor. “It was a funeral dirge. You’d know that if your ears weren’t stuffed with nostalgia.”

  Kael plucked a testing note on his lute, grinning. “So what I’m hearing is, none of you actually remember it.”

  The circle fell silent.

  Elder Mira—the only one who hadn’t spoken yet—lifted her head. Her eyes were milky with cataracts, but her voice was clear as a bell. “We remember pieces.” She reached into the folds of her shawl and pulled out a small, tarnished bell. “Like this. Cracked, but still ringing.”

  Kael leaned forward. The bell was engraved with a single word: Lira.

  His breath hitched.

  (There it was again—that name, flitting through his mind like a half-remembered dream. A child’s laughter, a flash of silver hair—gone before he could grasp it.)

  Elder Mira shook the bell. It didn’t make a sound. “Play for us, bard. Play what you think you know.”

  Kael exhaled, fingers settling on the strings. He’d heard the lullaby before—in taverns, in the whispers of the Canticle’s archives, in the hollows of his own nightmares. But this time, he didn’t just play. He listened.

  The first note was warm. The second, a question. By the third, the elders began to hum—each a different melody, each clashing with the next.

  Twelve songs. None the same.

  Kael’s lute trembled in his hands. The polished wood of its body caught the firelight, and for a heartbeat, he saw—

  A palace burning. A silver-haired figure turning to ash. A voice (his? Hers?) whispering: “You were never meant to endure.”

  Then—

  A drop of gold landed on his wrist.

  Elder Mira was weeping. Her tears gleamed like molten metal, rolling down her wrinkled cheeks and pooling in her lap.

  Kael’s fingers froze. “Did I… hit the right note?”

  Mira touched her face, startled. “No,” she murmured. “You hit the true one.”

  The air thickened. The elders’ humming stuttered, then faded, leaving only the whisper of the wind through the ruins.

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  And then—

  Snap.

  A lute string broke.

  Kael flinched, but the music didn’t stop.

  The song played on—clear, haunting, impossible—though his hands were still.

  The elders gasped. The bell in Mira’s hand rang at last, a sound like ice cracking.

  And from the shadows beyond the firelight, a voice (young, old, both) whispered the final line—the one no one remembered writing:

  “To love a king is to lose him twice.”

  The broken string curled against Kael's wrist like a dead serpent. The music—his music, yet not his at all—continued to weave through the air, notes spilling from an invisible hand.

  Elder Mira's golden tears sizzled as they struck the stone between her feet. "It remembers you," she said.

  Kael's laugh came out too sharp, too loud—a shield against the crawling dread in his veins. "Well, that makes one of us." He plucked the remaining strings experimentally, but the phantom melody overpowered his fumbling attempts. "Any chance this is just a very dramatic lute rebellion?"

  Elder Harkin wasn't smiling. The firelight carved hollows beneath his eyes as he leaned forward. "You've sung this before. Not here. Not now. But before."

  A moth landed on Kael's knee, its wings dusted with what looked like flecks of ink. He went very still. (Inkblight moths. Hadn't Aeris mentioned—?)

  "Focus." Mira's gnarled hand gripped his forearm. "The song is a key. You made it that way."

  The phantom melody shifted—a darker strain slipping in, the rhythm fracturing like ice underfoot. Kael's vision doubled:

  —A child's hands (small, ink-stained) pressing a music box into his own—

  —The Exiled One's mask (his own face, older, shattered) mouthing the same lullaby—

  —Sorin (crowned in flames) screaming as the notes tore him apart—

  Kael wrenched himself back to the present with a gasp. His shirt clung to his back, sweat-damp. "I don't—fuck—I don't remember writing this."

  "Of course not." Yara's cane tapped an uneven rhythm against the ground. "The Sanctum eats memories. But songs? Songs root. They grow in the cracks."

  Mira released him, her golden tears slowing. "Play it wrong again."

  Kael blinked. "What?"

  "The false versions. The ones we taught ourselves." Her milky eyes gleamed. "Break the truth's hold before it breaks you."

  The elders began to hum—purposefully off-key now, their voices clashing in deliberate dissonance. Kael seized the distraction, fingers flying across the strings in a jaunty tavern reel. "How's this for a funeral dirge?"

  The phantom melody faltered. The air grew lighter, the visions receding like tidewater.

  Harkin barked a laugh. "Horrible. Again."

  Kael switched to a drinking chant, then a bawdy ballad, each more ridiculous than the last. The elders joined in, their laughter creaking like old hinges. For a moment, it was just a bad performance in a crumbling ruin—no ghosts, no golden tears, no weight of forgotten kings.

  Then the moth on his knee burst into blue flame.

  The laughter died.

  Kael stared at the tiny pyre, the scent of burnt sugar curling in his nose. (Sorin's scars smelled like that when they flared.)

  Mira's voice dropped to a whisper. "It's not enough."

  The phantom melody returned—louder now, the notes twisting into something jagged. The ground trembled. Kael's remaining lute strings snapped one by one, the recoil lashing his fingers.

  "To love a king is to lose him twice."

  The words weren't whispered this time. They sang themselves, the vowels elongating like shadows at dusk.

  Kael's hands moved without his consent, plucking strings that no longer existed. The elders clutched their ears, but Mira leaned in, her breath hot against his cheek:

  "Ask her."

  "Who?" Kael gritted out.

  "The girl in your dreams. Lira."

  A final note rang out—clear as a bell, sharp as a knife—and the lute's polished face split down the middle. Inside the hollow body, something gleamed.

  Kael reached in, his fingers closing around cold metal.

  A crown.

  Not the Hollow King's jagged monstrosity, but a slender circlet—a child's size, its silver worn thin as a memory.

  The music stopped.

  Silence.

  Then, from the darkness beyond the firelight, slow applause.

  Kael turned.

  The Exiled One stood at the edge of the ruins, mask glinting. "You always did have terrible timing," they said—and it was his voice, worn rough with years he hadn't lived yet.