The table is too long.
It stretches the length of an abandoned opera house deep in Naples — its chandelier broken, its stage sunken, its curtains still embroidered with weeping saints.
Bombombini Gusini lays out the final fork.
It's made of bone.
Nine chairs.
Nine guests.
All dead.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Their bodies are rotted, their clothes ceremonial, their mouths sewn shut with crimson thread.
They are the last composers of the Score of the World's End.
Bombombini used to be the tenth.
Then he burned his part.
He stands at the head of the table, cigar blazing like a dying planet, coat stained with the ink of impossible notes.
"I called you here," he says, "because the Score is rewriting itself."
The corpses shift.
A music box opens on its own.
From it plays a single note — one sung recently. One that bled.
Tralalero's voice.
And beneath it?
A silence.
Lirilì.
Bombombini lifts a glass.
"A toast, amici miei. To memory. To prophecy. To the kiss we couldn't allow."
The corpses lift their glasses too — some with tendons, some with strings.
They clink.
Glass cracks.
"We lied," Bombombini mutters, his hand shaking."The kiss doesn't end the world.""It starts it."
Suddenly, one of the corpses stands.
Its stitches unravel. Its jaw falls open.
It speaks.
In Lirilì's voice.
"The first voice awakens. The second sings. The third bleeds. The fourth forgets. And the fifth—"
It screams.
Every candle in the opera house dies.
And in that dark, Bombombini hears it:
Footsteps.
Tralalero Tralala enters from the shattered balcony, one heel broken, one eye bleeding song.
"We need to talk," she hisses.
Bombombini draws a knife. A pen. The original Score. He's not sure which is more dangerous.
"You're not supposed to be here," he says.
"Neither are they," she nods to the corpses.
"They wrote your ending."
"Then let me rewrite it."
The room freezes.
And through the back door steps a third figure.
Soaked in seawater.
Eyes silver.
Dress made of weeping kelp and moonlight.
Lirilì Larilà.
Tralalero stops breathing.
Bombombini drops his pen.
Lirilì smiles — slow, sad, beautiful.
"The world already ended," she says."We're just remembering how.""But if we kiss again… maybe it begins instead."
And for a moment — the three of them are still.
The dead lean forward.
The air holds its breath.
The music of creation trembles.
And then—
The opera house explodes.