The written loom

(.. And the Sword That Remembered)

The piano room hadn’t been opened in years..
Dust covered the keys like ash from an old night that was never spoken of..
No one knew why the room sometimes trembled after dark..
Nor why the music sheets had started dripping with water..

But now, someone opened the door..

Not a person..
Perhaps memory..
Perhaps the kind of love that still aches..

Light stepped in, cautiously..
The piano made no sound..

Only a shiver crossed the room..
And then…
Paul, or his shadow, touched one key..

No note played..

But the room grew heavier..

Not like darkness weighing in, but like a body carrying the memory of everything that went unsaid..
Everything Paul had felt that night when he composed the Four-Hand Melody, and found himself alone with two..

Whoever touched that piano would feel, even for a moment, the full weight of Paul’s grief..
The silence that grows when love dies before it can be spoken..
The despair that finds no notes..
The surrender of a man who wrote music only to keep from collapsing..

And then, something happened..

The floor beneath the piano cracked..

And through the fracture, there was no floor..
There was earth, but not from here..
There was Japanese soil..
And an old cry that had never quite died..

Paul’s hand, suddenly, felt wet..
Like blood..
Like a wound reopening..

There was nothing visible..
Yet his palm was stained with blood that wasn’t his..

Then, without warning, a blade rang out through the heart of the house..

The sound of a sword..

But no hand held it..
No steel to be seen..
Only a shadow, kneeling where the wall had broken open..

It prayed..
No face could be seen..
But its light carried the shape of sorrow..

Was it Kenjirou?
Was it memory?
Or the past, demanding to be remembered?

The wall, the one that had stood for years between the Library and the Room of Silence, was no longer there..

It had dissolved, like the distance between two souls who recognize each other..

And from the opening, you didn’t see the next room.

You saw something else..

A forest..
A lake, from the other side of the world..

And somewhere, a woman with white hair was holding a postcard in her hand..

It read:

“Do you remember what you told me?
If I come, bring something for you to remember me by..
I did..
I brought myself..”

to be continued..