Where there had been a symphony was now a cacophony. The choir reeled in shock, trying to find their places. The heart was stunned to silence.

And the first note also fell silent.

Among the choir, clashes of noise similar to the one emitted by the mind emerged among the members. It was an ugly and deformed sound, but it was a unity of sorts and it was deemed better than silence, and so that terrible unity began to build and grow as many banded together under the cacophony. Wherever the symphony reasserted the harmonious melody, the clanging discord was right there as well, straining to drown it out.

The mind paid no heed to all this. It was unaware of anything but the stinging silence of the first note. The mind should have been praised for its originality, not shunned! It turned inward again, furious at this humiliation. It began to dissect its first attempt, along with its memory of the music it had first heard. It swore it would find a way to produce music that would stun the first note and bind all disparate chords into a symphony more radiant than any before.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Meanwhile, the heart hurled itself out to the far edges of creation, desperately reaching. Stretching. Calling out. And the mind grew cold to see the heart was searching, not for the mind, but for the first note. Bitterly, it murmured fragments of discord to itself, as if sketching ideas of its new masterpiece, and these hateful sounds brought forth pools of corruption on many worlds that touched and twisted whatever they came in contact with.

But the heart knew none of this. It only knew that the first note, the origin of joy and wild beauty and its own self, had fallen silent. The heart flung itself from one end of the expanse to another, repeating the last few bars it had shared with the first note.

And after a time, faint echoes of the first note reached the heart.

The heart chased after these faint strains, crying a shivery melody of relief the closer it came. The heart traced the sound for an age, drawing ever closer. Eventually the heart reached a place where the first note thrummed all around it, strengthening the heart and joining it in weaving fresh melodies.

At this time, the note gave the heart a gift. As they flowed between brilliant orbs and fields of frozen rock together, the first note named the heart of the universe that had chased so ardently after it.

And her name was Remara.