They never called themselves children. They did not even know they were such at first. They were scattered, born under other suns, in winter and desert weather, brought up by mothers and fathers who never mentioned Claire Monroe, never breathed her name. Yet, when they cried as infants, spreading their mouths, the cry was the same—a queer cadence, as if infant lungs had already learned a song.Midwives were the first to realize. An ocean-world birth on the planet Nereth: the infant cried, and the resonance thrummed through the walls of the birthing hut, making the water bowls clatter. A midwife's hands shook as she said in a hushed tone, "It is the same cry the others gave." She did not understand why she added others. She had only ever cared for this child. And yet the word was true, it was old.On an underground mining colony on the world of Kalith, a six-year-old boy astonished his father by, in the middle of fixing machinery, uttering sentences no one could decipher. The father in

The first drops fell at dawn. They were ordinary drops, cold on the skin, clear on the stone roofs of the town. But when they hit the ground, they did not seep into the earth. They stayed, glistening and trembling, each drop holding within it a spark of memory. People bent down and saw pictures flickering in the water, as if the rain itself was remembering.An old woman cupped her hands together to catch the drops and shrieked when she saw her childhood face staring up at her—her own five-year-old self, barefoot and dancing in her mother's courtyard. A fisherman held up his hands to the sky and saw his father's tired smile reflected in each drop of water. Children laughed and darted, sticking out their tongues, only to taste not water but the sweetness of birthdays years past, songs grandmothers used to sing, smells of dinners prepared in kitchens that no longer stood.Word spread quickly. By noon, the entire town was in the streets, drenched not merely in water but in life. The rain

The Forgetting Flower opened but once in an eternity. No one was really certain what eternity was, precisely, in this instance, but the words alone were enough to weigh across galaxies. They claimed that when the flower opened, all souls who had ever been wounded under remembrance, all spirits burdened with sorrow, would feel a soft unwinding—as though anchors long buried in their breasts were falling away.Myths recounted a valley far in the folds of time where the flower grew. It was not marked on any map, nor was it accessed through common roads. Some believed the valley was somewhere beneath the ground of forgotten worlds, others said it floated between two heartbeats and was only visible in moments of surrender. Visitors who stumbled on it generally were not capable of describing how they managed to arrive there. They described instead a gentle pull, as though from a dream or an invocation, or a strain of sound that led them down a path not present the day before.The flower itse

It began with a silence so complete that it was unbearable. Not the quietness of empty space, nor the quiet of a slumbering world, but a silence hidden beneath all that had ever been spoken. A silence doubled in the folds of sound, a second skin, invisible until one listened closely enough to fall through.Nobody had discovered it by intention. A player on a world that had been forgotten, weary after decades of playing for temples and taverns, one day got one note out of her stringed instrument. She had gotten the note out a thousand times before and never had it once occur to her. But on that day, her hand trembled, her bow swept by too slowly, and the note cracked. Instead of dissolving, it swung open, draining into a so deep it swallowed her.She plummeted—not physically, not in response to gravity's tugs, but in. And when she settled, she found herself in a place unlike any she had ever seen: a colossal library, shelves reaching up into directions her eyes could not map. The shelv

The Hall of Resonances was gigantic. It did not stretch up nor down, nor side to side, nor through. It just was—a room that existed outside of normal architecture of space. Shelves of sound, spirals of vibration, rivers of echoing frequencies flowed around and through each other. The Library Beneath Sound, older than can be measured, had contained the laughter of children from forgotten villages, the dying whispers of extinguished stars, the silence of lovers once who had shared a secret under alien skies.It was here that Mnēma, Keeper of the Last Note, was on the verge of surrender.Mnēma had been Keeper longer than anyone could remember. Her form was not human, not quite, but she had assumed a form of humanity in order to accommodate the visitors. She was old sometimes, hair silver as unstruck bells, eyes aglow with histories piled upon histories. She was young sometimes, voice as clear as rivers. She sometimes had no face at all, but only the hum of resonance, standing in the figu