The girl sighed, throwing her pennies into the river. It sang as it burbled, and she was tempted to sing with it. Her clasped lips quivered. Her soul begged for reprieve. But all it took for her to stop was a single glance at the ruined city below her.
I am a princess with no crown.
The towers still stood high, even as the sands of time threatened to tear them down. A glimmer of hope in a desert of ravenous despair. Now reduced to ash on a fading wind. A pressure began to build upon her. She clenched her fists, willing the tears to come.
But of course, they did not.
The only thing worse than losing something is not being able to grieve it.
Once, the girl would have thought that laughable. How could grief amount to anything in the face of loss? But then again, gone was the time when she had anything to lose at all. Her hand rose, unbidden, to the thread that sealed her lips shut.
And now I have nothing left to lose.
The world turned black. Clouds swarmed the once-blue skies. A mournful wind wept as the girl sang. Grief and loss and abandonment all tore from her soul, crawling from the darkest corners of her mind to be made manifest in the world above. For she was no ordinary princess.
She was the first enchantress, wielding power as old as time itself.
The rigors of alchemy were foreign to her, for she had no use of them; nor did she craft spells or mutter incantations under the breath. Her magic was different from theirs.
It is a gift as old as time. A gift of the soul itself.
The song flew from her lips. She did not know the language, but the emotions rang loud and true. And what is language, but the mere communication of feeling? The music of the soul, drawn into a realm that had no yearning for it anymore.
The few plants that surrounded her dropped dead with her despair. They crumbled as she did, the tears finally coming and turning the earth red.
She did not know when she stopped her song of grief, but when she did, the whole world seemed to have changed.
Where once there had been a darkness, there was now light. The dark, swarming clouds had parted, revealing the glorious sun hidden behind them.
The corpses of old plants before her had faded to ash, replaced by luxuriant leaves and vast, slithering vines and crawlers that slithered around her hands and legs. The winds ceased their song of misery, and instead sang a lighter song. One of hope, and joy.
The city was gone. She touched her lips, only to find they were smooth. Blood no longer trickled from the holes where the needle had gone through, in her desperate attempts at salvation. She had relinquished her grief, and the world had relinquished its sorrow.
It was only then that she saw what she had done.
Her grief had left her, only to become something else entirely. A thousand sins left her soul, only to find new ones to inhabit. She had let go of her misery, and it had found new toys to play with.
Such is the nature of evil. It will never be vanquished. Never forgotten. As long as there will be humans, there will be humanity.
And so, she crafted me. Her force of grief laid waste to the world, while my force of hope restores it. We dance, forever, in a twisted ballroom. For we are the Lost Choir, and our songs will remain long after you do. Yearning for the sleep of extinct gods, yet never allowed to rest.
Lost, but never forgotten.
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