I want to show you the universe I found. To Seydel, asleep in history, and to the person I once was. Or to you, who have lost your world. And so my eighth sonata is not despair, not confusion, not fear. It is not of the past, nor does it exist in the present. This is, in the end, music about the future.

I do not want to say that happiness awaits in the future. The future remains unknown even to me, and no one can pass judgment on the unknown. Only this: that the losses we have lived through were nothing more than a transfer station on the way to the future. And so I only hope that your life goes on playing, without end.

The music neither quickens nor slows. It simply repeats life with quiet persistence. The fingers travel unhurriedly across the keys and come to a still stop at the end. In the place where the music stops, only a breathless silence remains. She slowly rose from her seat and looked out at the audience buried in that stillness. Among the crowd sitting rigid with lips pressed shut, one woman let tears fall down her face.

At least one person received my music. My language reached at least one person.

She smiled brightly at the woman and then bowed deeply toward the audience. The audience remained in that deep, lingering quiet until she straightened and stepped back into the waiting area. She pushed through the heavy silence and walked inside, and the other participants stared at her with expressions she found difficult to put into words.

Winkler’s expression was the strangest of all. She found his face so absurd that a laugh escaped her, and the moment it did, she looked up and met Sio’s eyes as he rose from his seat. He walked over with a rigid expression and stopped in front of her. She blinked at the cool tension she felt coming off him, and in that instant, a tremendous wave of applause unlike anything before it erupted from behind her.

Sio grabbed her shoulders as she flinched in surprise and turned her around. Through the gap in the red curtain, the audience had risen to their feet, applauding and weeping. Even seeing it, she couldn’t be certain. Had her music truly reached them?

“That sonata. Was it meant for me?”

Sio whispered from behind her, but she was too dazed by the audience’s applause to answer him. He didn’t seem to have expected an answer, though. He didn’t wait for one and brushed past her. On his face as he walked toward the stage where the cheers poured down, she saw a gravity she had never seen on him before.

Sio walked calmly to the piano amid the applause meant for another and took his place before the audience. His gaze swept the seats one by one, and the ongoing applause gradually died down. He waited without a word, composed, for the chapel to sink back into silence.

Perhaps the audience caught his composure. Before long they had settled, faces calm, and looked at Sio the way she had stood when she first took the stage. The chapel that had been full of applause moments before grew so quiet that a pin dropping would have been heard.

Sio bowed politely to the audience, as though he had been waiting for exactly that silence. The applause that had faded filled the chapel again. Sio stood for a moment and let the sound wash over him, then walked slowly to the piano and sat down. His posture was so upright it put those watching at ease. It seemed to speak to the way he became endlessly serious the moment he sat before a piano.

In the extreme silence where only the occasional breath of the audience could be heard, Sio’s hands began to move. Without technique, without emotion, his fingertips simply drifted across the keys in silence, and from them loneliness rang out. The music that filled the space held none of the violence and passion she had encountered so many times today. The wanderer traveled through the world with serene detachment.

The music came to them slowly, like heavy footsteps. The dry, barren notes, which seemed on the verge of crumbling at any moment, carried no emotion at all. Yet within the silences between each phrase of the melody that barely held together, barely surviving each break, his language lived. The moment even the hands gliding across the keys came to a stop, that absolute stillness felt like a farewell announcing the end of the world.

Sio’s music held the audience’s breath captive. Each time the notes thinned to the point of breaking, the audience groaned with distress and clutched their chests, then exhaled deeply in relief when the sound rolled back in like a wave. The other participants in the waiting area were no different. Everyone fell under the spell of Sio’s music and drifted through the world his melody led them through.

The place they walked was a universe of nothingness, where not even a presence to hold onto remained. There was no pain here, and no hope. The wanderer bid farewell to a life worn to exhaustion and set out for a resting place at the end of the world, seeking eternal peace.

She knew. A person can never perform a world they have not lived, and the reason Sio’s music yearned so desperately for rest was that he truly longed for eternal rest. Then what kind of world was the genius of the age, revered by all, so desperate to escape?

No emotion showed on Sio’s face, shadowed beneath the yellow light. She looked at that face, as dry and barren as the music flowing from his fingertips, and found herself thinking of the rustling texture of the book she had read a few days ago. And then, as though a veil had lifted, the portrait of a young Seydel overlapped with Sio’s face.

Seydel, a great but lonely musician. The reason Sio had hated Seydel’s music so deeply.

The realization flashed through her mind, and the music gathered speed. From minor to major. From andante to allegro. In the depths of the sound that pressed on with a pretense of calm, a scream that had never made it out into the open lay hidden.

It was an instinctive rejection of someone who carried the same scent, a terrible revulsion at the sight of one’s own kind, and an extreme self-contempt directed inward. Sio Lieselotte had been withering away, worn down by a crushing loneliness, just like Seydel, who had gone in search of eternal rest. Why had she not seen it?

At that moment, the music stopped. Not at a natural ending. Sio had not yet played the final movement. The audience, still deep in the music’s spell, blinked in confusion and looked at one another.

“It seems that Sio Lieselotte has made a mistake.”

People whispered to each other and looked toward Sio, hoping the performance would resume, but Sio rose from his seat as though he had no intention of continuing. Instead of piano notes, the loud scrape of a chair across the floor rang through the chapel.

“What on earth is happening?”

The audience murmured among themselves, unable to hide their bewilderment. The commotion that began with a few people spread until it filled the entire chapel, but Sio bowed to the audience with the same composed expression he had worn when he first took the stage and walked off. As Sio made his way back, his gaze was fixed on her, standing blankly in the doorway.

“Sio. Why did you stop playing!”

She grabbed Sio’s arm the moment he stepped into the waiting area and pressed him, but before the words out of her mouth could finish, her hand found the answer first. Sio’s hand in her grip was trembling violently. Her startled eyes flew to his face. Sio looked back at her with a composed expression, then pulled his hand free and crossed the waiting area.

She stood motionless and looked down at the hand that had held his arm. The trembling she had felt in Sio’s hand still lingered in her own. It was not the trembling of nerves or anger. The trembling she had felt in Sio’s hand was far more violent and uncontrolled than that.

“Sio!”

The sharp slam of the waiting area door snapped her back to herself. She hurried after Sio and rushed out through the door. The moment she stepped outside, Astaire was standing there, running a hand through his disheveled hair and staring into the distance.

“Mr. Astaire. Sio is…”

She stumbled toward Astaire and grabbed the hem of his jacket, and his gaze, which had been fixed on something far away, came to rest on her. The moment she saw those eyes holding her completely, a rush of emotions welled up and her eyes grew red.

“What happened? How did this happen?”

She barely got the words out, making no effort to hide the tremor in her voice. Astaire looked at her with eyes full of concern, then calmly smoothed the hair she had come out in too much of a hurry to fix, and spoke.

“I told you. That Sio could never win the Jubilion.”

Strangely, that calm voice made the emotion surge even harder. The sudden shock of it all left her confused and overwhelmed, and tears fell from her eyes one after another. Astaire smiled with a bitter edge but made no move to stop her tears. He only opened his mouth carefully and continued his explanation in a quiet, measured voice.

“There was something wrong with Sio’s hands. It had been going on for several years. At first it was only a mild seizure, but it grew worse over time. What lasted just a few seconds became a few minutes, and a few minutes became a few hours. No one knew the cause, and no one knew how to treat it. The only thing that was certain was the symptom itself. The doctor said Sio would eventually lose the ability to move his hands as he wished. Medication had been keeping the symptoms suppressed somehow, but recently even that had stopped working.”