"We don't. We feed her." Rook pulled out a small, leather-bound book. "This is a comic. The lost issue of Muses8 , Volume 3. The one the Council burned. In it, Melaina isn't the villain. She's the hero. And if we publish it—if we believe it—we can rewrite her nature."
The Eighth Muse's Gambit
"Oh, we will." The Patron snapped her fingers. Rook's left hand began to fade, turning translucent, then invisible. "The Muse of Cuts is being cut . You'll lose a finger every hour until you confess that Melaina is irredeemable."
Clara stood. "What's your domain?"
Wolfgang, reincarnation of Mozart, didn't speak. He hadn't spoken in three weeks, not since he'd composed a sonata that made the listener forget their own name. His ability, Aural Calculus , let him hear the music of causality—the subtle harmony of events that hadn't happened yet. He was listening now, head cocked, face pale. Then he wrote on a napkin: She's already here.
"Melaina. And she's waking up." Rook finally looked at Clara. For a moment, her eyes were not human—they were negatives, light where pupils should be. "Every time you create something beautiful, you destroy something else. A tree for paper. A silence for a note. A possibility for a choice. Melaina is the sum of all those tiny destructions. And she's hungry."
Clara moved without thinking. She sat at the piano and played the bad, beautiful, ordinary song again. This time, she aimed the resonance at the Patrons. For one second, they felt what she felt: the terror of being small, the relief of being free, the joy of a wrong note that still sounded like you .