The stage was empty, yet the manor pulsed with anticipation.
Outside, the sky shimmered between night and day, as if time itself couldn't decide what hour it was. The air smelled of varnished wood, dust, and ink....the remnants of a thousand stories that had looped and folded upon each other. Beneath the stained-glass windows of the ballroom, a single grand piano waited, every key heavy with history.
Lila stood near it, trembling.
Her dress was no longer 1927 silk but something between centuries.....corseted lace giving way to the frayed hem of a modern coat. Her skin flickered between timelines, and when she touched her own reflection in a broken mirror, a hundred Lila's looked back....painter, lover, stranger, ghost.
Theo entered without a sound.
His eyes had changed again. Gone was the emptiness, the hard bitterness of the speakeasy days. In its place was clarity.....terrifying, luminous clarity. He had remembered. All of it. Every note. Every death. Every moment they had kissed as the world collapsed behind them.
"You're sure?" she asked, voice barely a whisper.
"No," he said. "But I know it's the only song left to play."
He moved toward the piano. His fingers hovered above the keys. They trembled....not from fear, but from the weight of finality. This wasn't just a performance. This was a funeral for time itself.
Lila approached slowly, the floorboards creaking under the strain of a collapsing timeline. The ink from her fingertips dripped to the floor like blood.
"This won't save us," she said. "Not in the way stories end clean."
Theo looked at her. The corners of his mouth twitched into a sad smile.
"I know. But maybe it'll save someone else. Maybe… it'll break the cycle."
He patted the bench beside him. "You still remember the harmony?"
"I was born with it," she whispered, and sat.
Outside, the Collector stirred.
It watched from the upper mezzanine, no longer disguised as a patron, no longer hiding behind silk and wine. Its form was raw now.....a silhouette of flickering fire and unraveling threads of fate. Where its eyes should've been, clocks spun backward. Its mouth opened without sound, but Lila could feel its fury.
They were defying it. Finally.
Theo touched the first key.
A single note. Not in major. Not in minor. It echoed across the room like the memory of grief. A note that didn't begin the song but remembered it.
Lila followed with a soft chord, her left hand painting beneath his melody. The piano cried softly.....no longer the weapon it had once been, but a creature aching to be understood.
Time began to ripple.
The stained glass cracked.....not from pressure, but from contradiction. Outside, a child with Lila's eyes skipped rope in a future that had never happened. Inside the house, a newborn cried from a century ago.
Theo kept playing.
The music was imperfect.....intentionally so. It skipped, wept, paused. There were moments of silence so heavy they drowned the next note. It wasn't the music of beauty. It was the music of memory. Of choices unmade. Of lives half-lived.
And then came the harmony.
Lila closed her eyes, letting her fingers dance. It was instinct, blood memory. She remembered playing this song in a different body. A different house. A crib. A brush of lips before fire. Theo's voice at the edge of death, whispering "again, just once more."
The Collector screamed.
It dropped from the mezzanine in a blaze of ink and void. The walls bled backwards. Portraits of Lila and Theo reversed, showing strangers beneath the oil paint. The manor tried to undo itself, but the music held it.
"You think your art can unbind me?" the Collector hissed, its voice layered with centuries.
Theo didn't look up. "No. But it can refuse you."
With a crash of chords, the air cracked open. Realities poured in.....Lila as a girl sketching in a hospital bed. Theo bleeding on a speakeasy floor. Vincent screaming at a mirror. Clara unborn, waiting.
The Collector lunged toward them.....but it couldn't touch them now. Not while the music was alive.
And then, the moment came.
Lila knew what she had to do.
She lifted her hand....and instead of striking another chord, she pressed her ink-stained palm onto the piano's ivory. A final mark. A seal.
Her gift, the ability to draw memory into matter, flared to life.
The music wrote itself in the air, suspended in smoke. The room filled with floating bars of melody, phrases from other lives. Notes that bled color. Words they'd never had the courage to say.
Theo looked at her, eyes brimming. "Lila…"
She leaned in, forehead to his.
"We finish it together."
He nodded. His hand reached hers. Their last duet.
Together, they struck the final chord.
And everything shattered.
When the smoke cleared, the manor was gone.
No foundation. No portrait. No crib. No echoes.
Just a field of wildflowers under a sky that had forgotten how to bleed.
Vincent woke in his study, his ring cold, and no memory of contracts. His hand trembled as he opened a journal...blank pages, but one sketch: a lion curled at the feet of a piano.
In an empty hospital bed in 2025, Clara Holloway opened her eyes. No longer haunted. The whispering had stopped. She touched her palm. No ink. But she wept, without knowing why.
And far away, in a tiny record shop in Paris, a scratched vinyl played a song no one had written.
A duet.
Soft. Final. Free.
"There are songs we never finish. But sometimes, finishing them is what lets the silence begin."