The girl's name was Lyra. She had been born to the sound of the sea and the village song, her first cries harmonizing, it was said, with the evening chorus. She was a child of the new age, for whom the Seventh Note was not a revelation but the very air she breathed. Choice was as natural to her as the tide.
Yet, Lyra was different. Where other children her age were already learning trades—mending nets, shaping clay, tending the glowing fungi—Lyra seemed content simply to be. She would sit for hours on the cliff, her chin resting on her knees, her gaze lost in the horizon. At first, her parents worried. "She lives in a dream," her mother would sigh, watching her from the doorway of their hut. "The world needs hands that work, not just ears that listen."
