A solemn musical note echoes across a wasteland with a lone beauty. It floats with hollow winds and clashes against tainted stone. It doesn't make it far in this kingdom, as nothing remains to hear its delicate sound.
A small girl sits over the edge of an aperture in the castle's walls. She rests on the horizon and lowers the sun with her shadow. Beneath her dangling feet from the castle stone, a fallen kingdom made of marble is buried in the soil of time. She looks out to the field of ivory and drags her fingers over the strings of a guitar.
As her voice crawls with another note to drift a society to sleep, she feels a breeze to remind her that she has company to hear her lullaby. She looks down to her feet, her black pigtails waving a final hope goodbye above her shoulders, and she closes her eyes. She keeps her voice clear with the skies. Her fingers pluck the strings with a plea of help in their touch. They're growing cold, and soon, the rest of her body will suffer the same temperature. The sun may rise again the next morning, but the warmth of humanity is still a distant memory. Underneath her eyes, however, is a wall of black. As she opens them again to the white debris surrounding her, a smile grows wide on her face.
If the ivory still remains, so does the chance of a future. She has no concern of whether the kingdom has fallen or risen. As long as she can see what once was, her reason to keep moving stands as tall as the castle she sits upon.
She finishes her lullaby and the world falls into a deep slumber. She picks herself up from the edge of the aperture and finds the silence of the dusk haunting. It's almost as if the world had never woken up at all…
The child turns to face a portrait hanging from a blemished wall of stone. Her gray eyes gaze deep into the painting, studying the three faces staring back at her, and she whispers the artwork goodnight. She steps closer to the portrait and lowers her guitar to rest upright against the wall. Every movement she makes is gentle and humble, as if she was aware that any harsh touch to the castle could send it crumbling with the rest of the kingdom. She knew she had become just as fragile, too.
The child looks at the portrait again and finds herself at the center. She sits up straight and with a beautiful, memorable smile with her two parents at her side. Her father is tall and strong, his skin covered in black fabrics, and it's clear he takes pride in his kingdom. Her mother is short and plump, adorned in a white dress, and she looks happier than ever to be with her family. The child looks to her past self in admiration and jealousy. Her family has since been shattered with the land they once ruled.
She steps away from the portrait and wipes a newborn tear from her soft, small cheek. She brushes off the dust from her sable clothing and watches the horizon as it fades into a bleak, empty darkness. She's met with this darkness before. She even considers it her friend.
Just as the ivory beauty that once heard her song of peace, the void from above crawls beneath the skyline to hear her voice for itself. For the child, it made no difference. She repeats her lullaby to welcome the darkness until it, too, rests over the kingdom to admire what it once was. As the hall she stands within shades into a deeper gray, the child paces to the end where a throne rests in the center of a new room.
The sounds of her footsteps echo until they fade with the rest of the world, her arms held tightly around her waist to keep herself warm, and she approaches the throne as the dark of the night crawls over the corners of the room. She runs her fingers over the golden armrests, admiring the seat in its unbroken stance, and lays her weight in the cushion. She stares out into nothingness as the night consumes all that exists until the child sings the dawn awake.
In this constant cycle, she repeats the same routine that she had begun when she first learned to sing. When the kingdom was flourishing in life, her mother had sat at the side of her bed and whispered a lullaby to wake her. When the stars began to reveal themselves, her father would whisper the same lullaby to put her to sleep.
But now, the child remains alone in this world. She knows to keep the kingdom alive, no matter what, that she must continue to help her father and mother keep their reign. She wakes her mother, her soul as bright as the sun that flourishes the land, and bathes in the rays of her presence. She wakes her father, his soul as bleak as the void that blinds life, and she rests numb in his arms.
She has a perfect family, and they have never left her behind. In this cycle, they will never leave her behind. The child may be the new sovereign of a broken, tattered kingdom, but her family will never meet that same fate.
She will repair this kingdom to be as complete as her family. It doesn't matter if they were once tyrants who brought this upon the land. It doesn't matter if they left their child with the weight of the throne. It doesn't matter if they'll never be able to hear her voice again. It doesn't matter if that family was, in all truth, more broken and blighted than the world they cradled aside their child. They had to uprise, conquer, and evolve.
They spent their lives to sustain their kingdom, no matter what.
The child must rebuild her kingdom, no matter what.