She barely managed to open her mouth, but her voice trembled pitifully. There was no answer. Instead, Sio’s face drew closer and closer, with her trapped between his arms. He was nearly close enough to touch, and she turned her head to avoid him, but he followed her relentlessly.

Flailing her arms and kicking her feet did nothing. Out of options, she bit down on Sio’s shoulder. The dull pain against his shoulder finally made him stop. She gasped for breath and shouted at him.

“Have you lost your mind?”

“Why? Wasn’t this what you wanted? You wanted my love.”

Sio raised his arm and touched his shoulder. His hands finally left her, but her body, worn out from struggling, would not move the way she wanted. She pressed her hand to the ground to push herself up, and in that instant Sio bore down on her shoulder again, and at the same time his hand slipped under her skirt. The hand that touched her thigh was cold. The fine trembling of his hand, seized by a seizure that would not stop, raised goosebumps on her skin.

His lips touched the back of her neck. The strange sensation of his lips licking and pulling at her skin finally broke her into tears. Sio’s lips moved from her neck to her collarbone, and from her collarbone toward her chest. Every time his breath touched her skin, her body shook with fear. 

She forced her trembling hands to move, pushed him away, and struck him across the cheek. It was not a particularly forceful blow, but Sio fell back from it. She pressed her shaking hands to the ground and barely managed to push herself upright.

“Is this what love is?”

She glared at Sio without even thinking to wipe the tears running down her face. A cool breeze touched the legs exposed by her bunched-up skirt. Whether from the cold or from shock, her body would not stop trembling.

“Then what is love? What exactly is it you mean when you say love?”

Sio said it with a numbness that was almost startling. His hand, still resting on her thigh, moved along her leg.

“The love I talk about has substance. But the love you talk about?”

He pressed a light kiss to her pale, drained cheek as the crawling sensation of skin against skin made her shudder.

“We were close. We spent more time together than anyone and talked more than anyone. And yet you never noticed. What kind of person I am. What I was thinking. How is that possible if you loved me? The Sio Lieselotte you loved was probably some fantastical man who sits before a white piano and plays beautiful music. Look at me now. If you had seen this pathetic Sio Lieselotte that day, would you have loved me even then?”

She looked at Sio’s face without a word. His face, faintly lit by the moonlight, was terribly pale. She knew she had to say something, but she could not bring herself to open her mouth. She could not tell whether it was the situation or something inside her. A smile formed on Sio’s face as he looked quietly at her. What it held was deep self-contempt. In all eight years she had known him, she could not recall ever seeing that expression on his face.

“That’s just how it is. Once people see what I really am, they’re always like this. I’m a pathetic man. Only music could save me, and now even that is gone.”

The hand that had been moving along her leg fell away. Instead, he reached out with his still-trembling hand and began picking the blades of grass from her hair one by one.

“Danyu Astrid. The Sio Lieselotte you saw was a wonderful person. If I could, I wanted to remain that person to the end. I thought it wouldn’t be so bad, being able to stay that beautiful in at least one person’s world.”

Sio did not look at her eyes. He kept his gaze stubbornly fixed on the grass in her hair and continued speaking.

“I had to keep my distance somehow. Because if I crossed the line, you would find out what I really am. But even so, there were times I thought I wished you would see through all of it. I even let myself hope that you, the one who spoke of love to me, might actually accept someone like me. But.”

The last blade of grass fell to the ground. Sio took off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders, then rose to his feet. Her gaze followed his movement. His face, turned against the moonlight, was so dark she could not make out what expression he wore.

She sat still and waited for the words that would come from Sio’s mouth, but he said nothing in the end, turned away, and left her side. In the unwanted silence, four bells rang out from the chapel not far away, announcing the Jubilion winner.

* * *

An unfinished performance, the first unanimous decision, a vanished winner.

A festival that began in joy ended in confusion with no way out. The people of the capital all remarked on how many upsets had marked this year’s Jubilion and murmured that there would never be another commotion like it.

She shut her ears to the countless stories that drifted in through the window and refused to leave her room. The temple priests came calling several times to request an audience, but she turned them away with excuses of poor health. She could not be certain herself whether she deserved to claim the rights of a winner.

The name the judges announced as the winner that day was Danyu Astrid. A unanimous decision with not a single dissenting voice. It was a remarkable outcome with no precedent even in the long history of the ancient competition. The newspapers mentioned the stunning decision day after day and praised her name, but she could not bring herself to feel any joy.

The judging panel acknowledged that the music Sio had shown on stage was exceptional, but held that they could not consider an unfinished performance as a subject for evaluation, and excluded him from the winner vote. Sio accepted the decision without any objection, but she did not believe the music he had presented was so worthless as to be beneath evaluation.

The sound of Sio’s music still rang vividly in her ears. In form, his music was unfinished, but the language within it was unmistakable. His words that day had pierced through her mind with the force of an arrow and lodged deep in her chest like a thorn. If music is language, and language is music, then who could call Sio’s music unfinished?

She recalled the face of Sio as he stood before the judging panel, concealing his trembling hands and holding himself steady. It was the composed, adult face she had always known, but within it she read a despair he had not managed to hide. What showed on that face was not a defeat built over a day or two. He was swallowing his despair with the ease of long practice, resigning himself to the future, and that fact made her feel utterly wretched.

When had Sio come to wear that face?

The thoughts consumed her mind. There had been a time when she was confident she knew him better than anyone, but perhaps, just as he had said, she had been seeing only the Sio Lieselotte she wanted to see from the very first moment they met. 

If the man she had loved was nothing more than a fiction she had built from her own illusions, then what meaning did her childhood, when she had thrown everything aside for him, hold at all? The ground she stood on crumbled beneath her in an instant.

She sat blankly at the piano and pressed the keys, and meaningless notes drifted aimlessly through the air. From A to G, from G to F. The irregular sequence of notes gradually shifted into the nocturne. The piece Sio had played by the sunlit window. Each time the melody rang through the room, despair and resentment passed through her in turns.

If what she had seen truly was his illusion, then why had Sio never given her even a chance to break it? Every moment she had looked at him with eyes full of love, every time she had flushed and stumbled through a girlish confession. Perhaps he could have given her a chance. That single chance had meant so much to the young Danyu Astrid.

The face reflected faintly in the piano was streaked with tears. She reached out and ran her hand across her reflection on the piano’s surface. The cold, hard touch felt as unfamiliar as a stranger’s face. It was the face of a young Danyu she had long forgotten.

The thought that the girl who had said farewell with such reverence that day still lived inside her frightened her. How long would she have to wander this universe, carrying her childhood, carrying the one she never had? Had all the words she had once poured from her fingertips been a lie? 

She closed her eyes and tried to recall the music of that day. Following the melody that circled in her ears, the past and present swept past like a panorama.

She asked herself, drifting endlessly through the unfolding landscape: what must she do to move forward into the future? And then an answer began from somewhere, blending with the music and flooding into her ears. She listened carefully to the voice of someone she could not identify. The indistinct murmur grew gradually clearer, and one distinct voice drove itself into her ear.