She had almost forgotten it now.

It came to her in scraps, sometimes, before she fell asleep, and in those moments she almost thought that she heard it once more, only to startle into a silent wakefulness. But her entire godforsaken journey through Destiny Bullshit had been, in a way, heralded by music. She recalled being still in her bed - the phantom voices in the cold air that had seemed both near her ear and calling from the snow, in unknown words set to a melody that she had never heard and yet which sounded familiar.

She had followed it, eventually, against her will. There was nothing left to follow, surely - she could not be more entangled than she already was, and if she could, she didn’t want to know about it. So when the music came again, this time seeming sedated by the summer heat, she awoke and expected it to once more dissipate in the popped bubble of an unremembered dream.

Instead, it continued, and she again lay still and listened to what she could not understand. The winter music had evoked a feeling impossible to place and mingled with dread. But dread implied anticipation, and what she felt now was nothing so much as unutterable grief. What was there to expect at the end of things, beyond the constant pain of remembering that the end had already come? The only anticipation in grief was that of putting out your hand, again and again, to touch what you expected to be there and would never be there again.

At times the melody seemed to tug at some corner of her memory, as if she might, if she tried hard enough - or perhaps could manage to stop trying - sing along with it. But there was something wrong in it. It jarred, dissonant, just where it seemed on the precipice of becoming known to her.

But even more strangely, the voice itself seemed to be one that she knew and could not place. She tried to shake herself awake - her confused and fractured thoughts might then settle into recognition - but it seemed to lull her beyond the first sharp pangs of grief and into the numb resignation beyond them. She resisted, in vain, this succumbing, as she resisted nearly every act of submission and obedience in her life, but it overtook her, and sleep returned before she could even give in to the pressing urge to cry.

When she awoke, she was not quite clear on whether she had dreamed it, although instinct told her that she had heard something real. Which meant nothing, of course, when attempting to remember what had happened when you were on the threshold between sleeping and waking. What a strange thing, dreams - she thought for a moment of that elaborate scene painted beneath the walls of the Garde, which seemed to speak to how real a dream could seem - how elusive they were, and how unmanageable for a woman who liked to manage as much as she could.

She had half-forgotten it by the time she rolled out of bed, and by the time she took the dog out it had gone from her head entirely, unthought of, as she swayed sleepily over her coffee and hummed a song that often got stuck in her head these days. For tender touch and bloody wars the fading knights so lovely, she hummed, and did not understand the sudden glimmering of a comprehension almost caught, only to slip away before she could even realize she felt it.

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