The Broken Song

"I finally got it right," Tom grinned, showing Sara the scrap of parchment he'd been scribbling on all morning. His void-marks cast dancing shadows across the paper in the pre-dawn light. "The last verse of our victory song. Been working on it for weeks."

Sara glanced at the unfinished lyrics, smiling at his childlike enthusiasm. "I thought you said victory songs should only be written after the battle?"

"Call it optimism." He folded the parchment carefully, tucking it into his vest pocket next to his heart. "Besides, after what we pulled off with that resonance engine? Feel like we've earned a few verses." His fingers absently stroked the fiddle in his lap, the makeshift strings humming softly. "We'll sing it tonight, after we get these people somewhere safe."

The refugee camp was just stirring to life around them. Tom had been up since before dawn, teaching songs to anyone who would listen. The young ones especially loved his lessons - the way he turned war stories into music, how he taught them to weave defiance into melody.

"That's not how it goes," he was telling little Maya, correcting her hand gestures for the chorus. "Like this - see? Each movement means something. This one's for breaking chains, this one's for choosing freedom." He demonstrated slowly, his calloused archer's hands gentle as he guided hers through the motions. "Every song is a story. Every story needs to be remembered."

"Promise you'll teach me the rest later?" Maya asked, clutching her worn doll.

"Promise," Tom winked. "After we get everyone safely moved. We'll have a proper lesson - I'll even let you try the fiddle."

The divine ambush came an hour later.

Reality crystallized without warning, divine geometry locking into place around them. Tom's void-marks flared with recognition - not containment this time. Something worse. His hands moved instinctively, reaching for his bow even as he called out: "Sara! High left!"

Her shield materialized just in time to deflect the first wave of celestial energy. The fiddle tumbled forgotten from his lap, landing with a discordant cry of broken strings.

"They've adapted," Rica's warning carried over the chaos as divine warriors materialized in perfect formation. "This isn't containment - it's erasure!"

"Get them out!" Tom was already moving, arrows finding marks in divine armor. Each shot bought seconds of precious time as refugees scrambled for the fallback point. "Sara, hold the line! I'll keep them busy!"

"Tom-" The fear in her voice made him look back. Their eyes met across the crystallizing air, and for a moment he wanted to tell her everything - how her smile made the war bearable, how he'd written songs he'd never dared sing about the way her guardian-marks danced in battle.

Instead, he grinned. "We've done this dance before. Just need to break their rhythm, right?"

His arrows sang their own defiance as divine warriors pressed in. Each shot was a promise - that mortal skill still mattered, that perfect order could bleed. But his quiver grew lighter, and the enemy had learned from past encounters. Their formations shifted, closing the impossible angles he'd exploited before.

Then he saw it. The divine archer, wreathed in celestial light, taking aim not at their defensive line but at Maya. She had stumbled behind Sara's shield, still clutching the doll he'd complimented earlier. Her small hands were frozen mid-gesture - the movement for breaking chains, the one he'd just taught her.

Time crystallized into perfect clarity. There was no clever solution. No impossible shot that could save them both. Only a choice.

His last arrow flew true, finding the divine archer's throat. But the price was his position - the moment of exposure they'd been waiting for. Divine energy lanced through reality itself, burning away everything it touched.

"TOM!" Sara's scream held a lifetime of unspoken words. Her shield reached for him with desperate speed, but divine geometry had already locked into place. There would be no last-minute rescue this time.

He tried to hum their victory song - the one he'd just finished writing, the one they'd never get to sing together. The parchment in his vest pocket burned along with everything else as divine light consumed him. His void-marks flared one final time, not in power but in pure defiance, in stubborn mortal courage that even perfect order couldn't erase.

The divine light faded, leaving nothing but crystallized air where Tom had stood. For one terrible moment, everything stopped - the battle, the screams, even reality itself seemed to hold its breath.

Sara's shield shattered. Not from divine power, but from her own grief exploding outward. Her scream wasn't words, wasn't even human - it was something primal, a sound of pure loss that made even divine warriors hesitate.

"No, no, no..." Her hands reached through empty air where he had been, guardian-marks pulsing wildly as she tried desperately to shield what was already gone. "Tom! TOM!"

Rica caught her before she could run into the divine fire still burning the air. "Sara, don't-"

"Let me GO!" Sara fought against Rica's grip, shields forming and breaking around them like glass. "He's not- we can still-" Her voice broke as reality sank in. Tom was gone. Not wounded, not captured - erased. Her legs gave out, but Rica held her up.

"You bastards!" Rica's voice carried such fury that nearby divine warriors actually stepped back. "You perfect, soulless BASTARDS!"

Maya's small voice cut through the chaos: "Get up." She was staring at the space where Tom had been, her doll forgotten on the crystallized ground. "Please get up. You promised to teach me the rest. You promised..."

The divine warriors pressed their advantage, geometric patterns spreading like frost. But something changed in Sara. Her guardian-marks shifted, became something new - not just protection but pure rage given form. Her shields didn't flow anymore; they shattered outward like shrapnel.

"You want perfect order?" Her voice was deadly quiet as she stood, void-marks blazing. "I'll show you broken patterns."

What followed wasn't a battle - it was devastation. Sara's shields became weapons, grief and fury combining into something that made divine geometry fracture. Rica fought beside her, experience turning to cold vengeance. Together they drove back the divine warriors, not with tactics or skill, but with the raw power of mortal loss turned to rage.

They found his bow and fiddle afterward, somehow untouched by divine fire. The bow's void-marks still pulsed faintly, as if searching for their wielder's hands. The fiddle's strings had snapped - all except one that hummed softly, endlessly, with the last note he'd played.

Sara knelt in crystallized earth that had forgotten how to be soil. Her hands shook as she reached for the instruments, then stopped - unable to touch them, to make real what they represented. Her guardian-marks swirled with patterns she'd never made before, protection becoming remembrance becoming grief.

"He promised," Maya's small voice cracked as she stared at the space where her teacher had been. Her doll hung limply from one hand, the other still frozen in that gesture for breaking chains. "He promised to teach me the rest of the song."

Rica found the scrap of parchment - just a corner that had somehow survived, edges burned but a few words still legible: "...when mortal hearts defy..." The rest was ash, like him. Like the future they'd never get to sing about.

That night, Sara sat alone by their usual campfire spot. Her shields kept forming unconsciously, trying to protect the empty space where he should have been. Where he should have been tuning his fiddle, complaining about broken strings, teaching children to weave defiance into harmony.

Someone started one of his songs - an old one about broken chains and chosen freedom. The voices faltered, died. The silence that followed was deafening.

In the days that came after, they found pieces of him everywhere:

Half-finished songs scribbled on scraps of paper, A spare fiddle string coiled carefully in his pack, Arrows he'd marked with their names: "Sara's impossible shot," "Rica's revenge", Little gifts he'd been saving - bright ribbons for the refugee children, a new string for his fiddle, a tiny carved flower he'd never gotten to give Sara

His bow was retired to the hall of remembrance, but the fiddle they kept. It traveled from camp to camp, its broken strings replaced again and again. Each new wire sang with echoes of his last song, each note a reminder that mortal music could still exist in a world of perfect order.

They found other archers. Other musicians. Other teachers. But no one else could make shields dance with arrow-song quite like Tom. No one else understood how to turn war-songs into lullabies, how to weave hope into melody, how to make even divine warriors pause at the sound of mortal music.

Sara never sang their victory song. The last verse remained unfinished, like so many things he'd left behind. But sometimes, on quiet nights when the void-marks pulsed like heartbeats, she would find herself humming fragments of familiar tunes. Not his songs of defiance or battle, but the simple melodies he'd play in moments of peace - when the war felt far away and they were just people around a fire, hoping to live long enough to sing another verse.

And somewhere in the spaces between divine law, in the cracks of reality where mortal defiance still meant something, an echo remained - a single note of unfinished music that perfect order could never quite erase. A reminder that some songs, like some hearts, never truly stop playing.

Even if they never get to finish their last verse.