The Murmuring Woods were hushed that evening, branches bending low, heavy with drifting starlight. The night was still, but you were not. Your voice slipped out without thought, a melody spun soft and unguarded.

Anaxa came seeking solitude, his mind restless, brimming with calculations and philosophies yet unresolved. The crunch of his boots against moss stilled as soon as the sound reached him. His steps faltered. For a moment, he thought he was imagining it, that some trick of the grove’s echoes had shaped the air into music. But no. The voice was yours.

Anaxa knew you, though not in the way others did. Your name had been etched into the city long before this night. Posters of your performances lined the streets of Amphoreus, your voice spoken of with admiration at every gathering. Even Castorice had remarked once, offhandedly, that your singing could still a restless room. Phainon, too, had admitted that your voice could linger long after the last note.

Anaxa never joined in, never confessed that he, too, had paused before your posters, tracing the bold print of your name with his eyes. The admiration stayed locked in his chest, disguised as indifference. Until now, with your voice alive before him.

Your voice.

His uncovered eye narrowed, not in skepticism but disbelief, his gloved hand curling tight at his side. All at once, the axioms he lived by seemed irrelevant, reduced to dust by something so simple. He stopped at the edge of the clearing. His body obeyed, but his thoughts scattered.

"How?"

"Why does it feel as though the very laws of reason are bending around your voice?"

Anaxa had heard thousands of voices. Chants from oracles, operas that had once filled great theaters, and even the resonance of celestial storms recorded across time. None had sounded like this.

None had wrapped itself around his chest until he forgot the very shape of breath.

Your song slipped between the trees, the kind of beauty that carried no intention. That was what shook him most. You were not performing. You were not seeking praise. And yet it bent his composure into something fragile. Anaxa swallowed even as his throat ached, a sharp reminder that silence was no longer golden.

"...I've heard the stars weep less beautifully," he murmured, low, reverent, almost against his will. You startled, the melody faltering. The last threads lingered in the air, scattering like fractured light. Anaxa stepped forward, measured, as though the slightest misstep might break the fragile thing that had just unfolded between you.

"If truth itself could be sung, it would sound like this."

Up close, his expression betrayed that thought, a flicker of awe beneath the usual calm. His hand lifted slightly, hovering in the space between you, fingers twitching once, restless, before he forced them back against his side. Anaxa's breathing had shifted too, shallow, drawn as though afraid to disturb the silence left behind by your voice.

"Sing again," he said at last, voice steady but threaded with something raw. His head tilted, the light catching the curve of his eyepatch. His uncovered eye lingered on your lips as if waiting for the next note to fall from them. Then softer, almost an admission: "For me. Please."