[Intro]
[Nylon strings pick the five-note motif beside slow underground water.]
Tell me the weight of his hammer and chain.
Tell me the sound of his boots in the rain.
Tell me the joke that he told at the wheel—
Give me one line that can teach me to feel.

[Verse 1]
Lark laid the portrait between them on stone,
Sang of a forge in the mountain of Thorne.
[Lark]
“He burned morning bread on the flat of his blade,
And whistled off-key at the tools that he made.
He called you ‘little mountain’ though you stood just as tall,
He lost every wager, then doubled them all.”
[Narrator]
Brunna watched water crawl black through the cave:
[Brunna]
“You’ve drawn me a stranger too foolish to save.”

[Refrain]
It was the rhyme that would not heal,
A tune with bone but none with feel.
The facts stood straight, the notes rang true—
Yet nothing in the singing knew you.

[Verse 2]
Lark changed the key and softened the pace:
[Lark]
“He carried your portrait inside his breastplate case.
At Red Hollow Ford, when the bridge came apart,
He held up the timber and ruptured his heart.
His final word, Brunna, was simply your name;
He died buying minutes while refugees came.”
[Narrator]
She gripped the locket till its copper edge bit:
[Brunna]
“I know why I mourn—but I cannot inhabit it.”

[Refrain]
It was the rhyme that would not heal,
A tune with bone but none with feel.
The facts stood straight, the notes rang true—
Yet nothing in the singing knew you.

[Instrumental]
[Cello carries Dorrin’s melody while the hurdy-gurdy answers with one deliberately wrong final note.]

[Verse 3]
Then Lark’s blind future broke into the song:
[Lark]
“The brother returns when the red stars belong—
No, brother rhymes better with ‘smothered’ below,
And ‘home’ with the grave where the nameless ones go.”
[Narrator]
He stopped with his fingers held hard on the strings;
Prophecy fluttered like trapped cellar wings.
[Brunna]
“Singer, your future is ill.”
[Lark]
“The truest line frightens me still.”

[Bridge]
[Lark]
“I see you remember him after we win.
I see you embrace him in somebody’s skin.
I see five old heroes with nobody’s face,
And new hands throw red bones in this very place.”
[Brunna]
“Then alter the song.”
[Lark]
“I have tried. It keeps rhyming wrong.”

[Final Refrain]
This is the rhyme that would not heal,
No charm, no cure, no holy seal.
But facts can stand where feeling fled,
A scaffold for the loved and dead.
If grief comes late, I’ll keep his name;
If love comes never, I’ll guard the flame.
The song cannot restore what crimson corners steal—
But it can keep an empty chair from learning not to feel.

[Outro]
Brunna took the portrait back at dawn,
Though dawn beneath the earth was drawn
Only by a paler strip of shale.
Lark tuned the wrong string—and finished the tale.
