Chapter 2 The Girl Who Spoke to Shadows

There are cities built of steel and cities built of silence.

And then there is Ileno, a place woven from twilight - a city where pigeons forget how to fly and clocks sometimes tick backward if no one is watching. It sits on no map. It pretends to be ordinary. Most never notice. Most never look.

But Ariella Dawn was not most people.

She was born during a power outage, in a third-floor apartment that overlooked a crumbling library with no name on the front. Her mother said the power came back the moment Ariella cried - not a wail, but a song, long and low like wind through glass. The nurses looked at each other, unsettled. Nobody said anything.

By the time she was seventeen, Ariella had learned not to hum in crowded places. Her music made strange things happen: light bulbs flickered, pigeons cooed in unison, and once, a streetlight bent its neck to listen. Her mother said, "Darling, the world isn't ready for that part of you."

Ariella didn't disagree. But sometimes, she missed being whole.

On the morning it began, the city was restless. The air smelled of metal and forgotten things. Ariella walked her usual path - past the corner café that sold lemon tarts, past Old Solomon asleep in his booth like clockwork, and down to the rusted fence near the river.

It was there, beneath the willow tree with bark like burnt paper, that she found it.

A mirror.

Not a discarded hand mirror, nor a shiny shard of glass, but a full-length, ornately carved looking glass, standing upright in the dirt, untouched by rain or dust.

And in it - not her reflection.

A boy.

He stood barefoot in snow that didn't exist on her side, his eyes pale as cloudlight, and when he opened his mouth, she felt the echo in her bones:

"You're the last of the listeners,

And the song is dying."

Then the mirror shattered.

Not outward - inward. As if something had pulled it, swallowed it, taken it back.

Ariella stumbled back, heart pounding. A pigeon landed on the fence beside her and said, "He's not supposed to know yet."

Then it flew away