Primary Instrument: Own Voice Armament: None Soul Leitmotif: Void Ornaments: None
Memory Field: The Girl Left Behind That Changed a God
Ballad Fragment Introduction. The Girl Left Behind
The memory comes to Mira in fragments, like trying to reconstruct something from salt and ash.
She remembers a man’s hands—calloused, stained, trembling. She remembers being lifted, and the weight of that lifting. She remembers the smell of sickness and the ocean, mingled together so entirely that she can never separate them.
She remembers the sound of him weeping. But also the sweet sound of a gentle lullaby washed by the waves.
A sickly father—ravaged by a consumption that the healers in the mountain villages had no names for—walked three days down from the high country to reach Lune Shallow. He did not come for healing. He came because he was dying, and he knew it, and he needed one thing before the end: he needed his daughter to live.
The fisherman who found her on the dock that morning was named Kael. He was alone — his wife had died in childbirth years before, and he had learned to accept the silence of his home as the price of avoiding the pain of sharing it. Lovestruck and still grieving, yet he knew the sea had few space left for spared tears.
But he couldn't bear the sight of a child left at the dock, of a child wrapped in cloth expensive once yet now threadbare, with a letter that simply read: “Her name is Mira. Her father is dead. Her mother is dead. Save her. She deserves the world. —A Father’s Last Act” — a child like that could not be left alone.
And so, he took Mira under his care.
Kael later told people he did not decide to raise her. He just did not choose not to. And by the time he was aware of the decision that had been made, Mira was already 3 years old and calling him "Father."
Ballad Fragment I. An Ill-Stricken Orphan
For most of Mira's childhood, Lune Shallow was a place of relative peace. The Second Wave of the Great Plague had ravaged many settlements, but it had largely spared the secluded bay, and the fisherman raised her as his father had raised him— with work, with expectation, with the kind of love that is expressed through action rather than softness.
Kael was also a careful man; he had grown cold since the passing of his wife, yet he still kept memory of them, and saw a home in everything Mira did — in the way she moved, the way she grew, and in the way she delighted in savoring sweets every so often. However, his work, while simple, required dedication. For most dawns he would be leaving early their home until night came. Yet he would not leave Mira unattended on his house. On the contrary, he would often take her with him to the docks, but this wouldn't last long.
The cough came the year she turned 8. It started as a tickle. Then a persistent rattle in her chest. Until one sunset, when Kael was securing his ship after work's end on the harbor with Mira's help, it deeply worsened.
It was close to nightfall, and both Mira and Kael were about to finish a long day of work. They were each on opposite sides of the deck, anchoring the mast of a wooden vessel. Mira pulled the line taut, made two passes, and Kael was waiting for her to secure the line, but before she made the third pass her lungs faltered.
A deep cough bent her double.
It felt like something inside her was trying to escape her throat, and by the time it had passed, her hands had lost the strength required to keep the boat steady, and the grip pulled her to the cold sea.
Kael lunged immediately to the waves to rescue her. Mira was fighting as much the cough anew as she was trying not to drown.
Once washed ashore, Mira was trembling but without signs of any major injury. In a sigh of relief Kael kept her in a tight embrace. Delicately streaking the sides of her hair, humming the familiar lullaby that would calm Mira.
It had been a long time since the fisherman ever took care of someone like this. His heart never fully healed from the loss of a possible family cut short, yet the sight of Mira in his embrace was the reflection of the home he would vow to never lose again.
The truth was, he could not call her "daughter." The word caught in his throat — not from rejection, but from the weight it carried. To say "daughter" was to name what he'd failed to protect. So instead, Kael found smaller names, and gentler approaches. He found ways to speak his love that didn't require him to speak his loss.
And to protect Mira as much as it was to protect himself, it would become the language of their entire life together.
The incident was as much of a toll for Mira as it was for Kael. Mira had learned that her body wasn't fully hers. The frailty of her lungs was the only inheritance her biological family had left. And for Kael, it was the wake-up call to the delicate thread that kept their home alive.
From now onwards, he would leave Mira on her own while he went fishing, as an act of love to protect her from the strains of physical labor and the toll of her condition.
The routine changed slowly, then all at once. Mira used to spend the entire day at the docks by his side. Now the mornings belonged to the silence of the house when Kael went off at sunrise.
At first she still tried to help. She sometimes carried water from the nearby well on top of the harbor's hill to help Kael with the morning routine. But one time too often would the bucket’s handle bite into her fingers, until halfway home her hands began to shake.
One morning as her cough rose, raw and tearing. The water spilled into the dirt in a dark fan when she was close to home. Kael came out at the sound, took the bucket from her without rebuke, and carried it inside himself.
Another Moon, Mira tried to mend nets alone one afternoon while Kael was still away. The twine blurred when the coughing fit came; her fingers lost their rhythm. When Kael returned, he found the net tangled in her lap and her chest heaving as she forced shallow breaths between spasms.
He did not scold her then either. He sat beside her and untangled the net in silence, his jaw tight with a heavy heart.
After that, Kael stopped asking her to help with work that demanded strength.
Instead, she watched.
Often she would stroll alongside Lune Shallow's market, harbor, and the docks where her biological father had left her. It wasn't long before Mira learned which fishermen came back with their shoulders heavy. She also came to recognize which merchants lied by watching their hands instead of their mouths, and she became skilled at reading the gait of the few spare widows who moved as if the air itself pressed against them.
While Mira felt the weight of being by herself, Kael in turn however, would make it up by showing her love through teaching her skills he had learned on the waves whenever he came back from a fishing trip.
He feared hurting her as much as he feared neglecting his own role as a father.
Thus, Mira learned to mend nets in the evenings, when breathing was easier and the air smelled of salt and cooked fish rather than murk and wet rope. She learned to read the Moon's phases and their effect on the tides. She knew the taste of salt, the color of different depths, the way the harbor changed with the seasons.
But perhaps the most important lesson was what Kael told her one sunset while they mended the nets together.
He now reached consistently to one of those smaller names — the one that had become his language for loving her when "daughter" was too heavy.
"What is it, sweet tooth?" Kael said in a soft, raspy voice when he noticed her oblivious gaze into the horizon. "You look as lost as the barnacles washed ashore."
Mira remained muted, mechanically moving her hands but on a blank stare.
"You forgot how to tie the ends? We can go over knots again if you're unsure," Kael said jokingly, expecting a response from Mira but she kept a stare to herself.
"I'll treat you something sweet nice after we head to the market tonight," Kael proposed while throwing a net to catch Mira's attention. "Merchant supplies are ever running dry with the Great Plague but with today's catch we can afford a few luxuries. Maybe even one or two of those breads you like a lot—"
"Father, why can't I be with you?" Mira replied quietly with tears building on the rim of her eyes.
"Ah, that's what it is," Kael let out a deep sigh while trying to make up the words as he scratches the top of his forehead. "You know what happened last time. I would like to take you with me sweet tooth, but hard labor is not for you. And that's not all there is to work, tracking the Moon is much more important than reeling the fish."
— This article is abridged. The full record runs longer in the archive.