Why can’t my sound ring out? 

No matter how much I played, day and night, no answer came back. Several days and nights passed while I clung to the piano searching for that answer. And as the playing continued, distant memories drifted through without pause.

The time that began with my eleven-year-old self flows on without mercy and stops before nineteen-year-old Danyu Astrid. Within those eight years, the scenes my eyes had taken in, the people who had stood beside me, and the sounds I had listened to all tangled together without order and stirred my mind into confusion.

The final destination of memory was always Sio Lieselotte. Every smile and every tear I had ever known began with him and ended with him. From the moment I resolved to forget him, that fact filled me with such bitter resentment and indignation that I didn’t know what to do with myself.

As I turned over how meaningless those years had been, years I had poured into someone who would never give me his heart in return, the anger soon shifted into self-reproach. Why hadn’t I been able to stop these feelings? Why did it have to be him that I fell in love with? It was an accusation directed at my past self, but the fact that I was still the one it targeted never changed.

From the moment I understood that, I grew afraid of my own accusations. I feared a future spent living in regret and resentment, and I feared the version of myself that could only turn blame inward. It was probably around then that I made the decision. To erase the past in which I had loved him.

Trying to overcome the unbearable pain of heartbreak by denying the past. I rationalized it as something I couldn’t help, but it was clearly a cowardly decision. The moment I acknowledged that, a voice rose from somewhere deep inside me.

That’s right. I am a coward. But so what? There’s no need to be noble right up until the moment you let love go. Be as cowardly as you want, Danyu Astrid.

The note that began with a voice whispering from beneath the surface soon rang out into the world, following my fingers, following the movement of the keys. I couldn’t tell whether the sound filling my ears was imagination or reality. I snapped my eyes open and looked down at the white keys. My hands, which I stared at blankly, trembled in small, fine shudders, like hands belonging to someone else. I pressed a key carefully, and the sound I had heard in that distant, dreamlike place was still ringing.

It isn’t a dream. This is real.

Along with the sensation of returning to reality, pain arrived in my arms as well. But before the pain, anxiety swallowed me whole. For the past eight years, my sound had always been Sio, and for that reason I couldn’t be certain whether the sound I had just found was truly my own. The desire to confirm that fact right then and there filled my head completely.

I wrapped my hands around myself and rose from my seat. The room around me was dim. I had no idea how much time had passed since I sat down at the piano, but it didn’t matter. I walked out of the salon on unsteady legs and left the manor.

“Miss!”

A flustered maid called out to me, but my feet didn’t stop. The moment they touched the street, my slow walk became a quick stride, and the quick stride became a run. The stares of people watching me with puzzled looks pressed into me from all sides.

I pushed through those stares and stopped where my childhood still lived. The familiar blue gate. It was Sio Lieselotte’s house. My lungs burned from the first real run I’d taken in a long time. I knocked on the gate as roughly as my ragged breath, and the gate swung open with a touch of irritation. It was Sio.

“Danyu. Your face.”

Sio had opened the door with an annoyed look, but the moment he saw my face, which must have been a complete mess, his expression shifted to surprise.

“Play the eighth sonata of Seydel for me.”

I grabbed the hem of his clothes without even listening to what he was saying. At the sight of my desperately trembling hands, Sio seemed to lose his words and fell silent. He studied me, searching for the reason I had come to him so abruptly and without explanation, and then a faint sigh escaped his lips.

“I don’t do Seydel.”

“Please. I know, but please.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to hold onto the notes drifting through my mind, tried not to let them slip away. Whether the sound I had found was truly my own and not Sio’s. That was the certainty I needed right now.

“I don’t know what’s going on, but. Fine. Alright.”

Sio had been staring at me for a long moment with a troubled expression, and then he turned away. I already knew where he was headed. Until around the age of fifteen, before I witnessed his secret meeting with his lover, I had always played piano with him there.

The room I stepped into after so long still held the same piano, sitting there alone and unchanged. I reached out and touched it, overcome with a feeling of longing, and when I looked up, Sio had already taken his seat at the piano and was watching me.

“There may be mistakes. I haven’t even looked at the score since I played it a very long time ago.”

Mistakes. It was a word that suited him poorly, given that he pursued perfection in piano playing above all else, but I had no room left to argue the point. The music circling inside me felt like it could scatter at any moment. I gave a quick, frantic nod, and Sio’s hands began to move across the keys.

The introduction launches with notes that leap up dynamically. Allegro. Within the rapid succession of notes there is a perfect balance of dynamics that grips the heart and squeezes it. My breath catches as the melody shifts repeatedly, now strong, now soft.

A harmony so perfect it frightens. And yet within the insistent, repeating chords there is an undeniable chaos. The Seydel inside the eighth sonata was a man lost and plunged into confusion. He tries to accept the situation calmly, pretending it means nothing, but the chaos and anxiety over the reality bearing down on him snag at his heels.

Sio’s notes summoned Seydel, dead for centuries, into this very room. The reason he could recreate Seydel with such near-perfect fidelity was that he, too, had once stood with one foot in that confusion. Sio had been lost once, and he had stopped right there.

But I wouldn’t do that.

My heart whispered it.

“Ha, haha.”

As the performance climbed toward its peak, laughter spilled out of me. I couldn’t bear how delightful this all felt. What little strength remained drained out of me along with the laughter. The legs that had barely been holding me up gave way and I sank to the floor, but the laughter wouldn’t stop.

“Danyu!”

Sio stopped the performance at the sight of me crumpling helplessly to the ground and stepped toward me. He looked down at me with a strangely furrowed expression. The confusion that had lived inside his playing moments ago now showed plainly on his face.

“Why are you crying?”

His hesitant words made me realize I was crying. Even so, I couldn’t wipe the smile from my lips. The tears pooled in my eyes fell weakly onto the hem of my clothes.

My music. My sound.

My consciousness grew dimmer and dimmer as the notes swirled at my ears.

In the depths of the darkness, I face once again the great iron gate that had been blocking my path. The gate that had been covered in locks now had only a single lock remaining. There was no need to feel anxious. I already knew where the last key was hiding.

I begin to fly, following the music that reaches me from far away. There is not a trace of hesitation in the wingbeats carrying me toward my destination. Following the path that memory knows, I drift back, back into the past. Perhaps to the very first place. The small house with the blue gate where my music began.

Sio Lieselotte is there. By a window where sunlight pours in. From his fingertips, the nocturne that had embedded itself so firmly in my childhood rang out. Standing before him was a young girl of eleven. But the moment Sio’s eyes reached the little girl, she became nineteen-year-old Danyu Astrid in an instant.

Now I move my feet slowly and stand before Sio. A smile slipped out of me without me realizing it at how quickly our eye levels had come to match. Inside Sio’s green eyes, which stared steadily at me, lived everything of young Danyu. Affection and admiration. Envy and resentment. Countless emotions swirled quietly within his gaze.

I know. The person before me is Sio and yet is not Sio. He is my childhood, and the world that was once everything to me. I pressed my lips to all of it with reverence. From where our lips met, a brilliant wash of light poured out. I turned my head, unable to bear the blinding brightness, and the music that had been circling around me vanished in an instant.

My music is no longer here. My music is somewhere farther from here, in my present.

I snapped my eyes open. I blinked several times until the blurry world sharpened into focus. The surroundings were unfamiliar, but the scent was familiar. Sio’s house. The moment that thought formed, I heard movement beside me.

I turned my head thinking it might be Sio, but the person standing there was Astaire. He was kneeling on one knee beside the bed, watching me with a strangely pained expression. Before I could even greet him out of gladness, he let out a sigh and reached toward me.

“They say you shut yourself in the salon for three days and did nothing but play piano.”

His words surprised me more than the hand smoothing back the hair that had matted to my face with sweat. Three days. I couldn’t believe that what had felt like such a brief, fleeting moment had stretched on for three whole days. I sat up abruptly and looked down at the two hands that had been playing the piano. I frowned at the strange lack of strength in both hands, and Astaire shook his head slowly.

“You overworked your hands so badly that moving them will be difficult for now. The doctor said to rest for at least a few days. Longer would be even better.”