By and by the girl and the boy arrived at a citadel, with high walls and a watch tower.

“I know this place,” said the boy. With his eyes closed, he heard the piping of trumpets and the steady, periodic blaring of a French horn. The tune had changed, but it was the location where the children of his island had been told to go, so many years ago.

The girl approached the great metal gate but then backed off in a sudden bout of shyness.

“You go first,” she said to the boy.

The boy smiled. He knew that the girl could just walk towards the gate and the metal itself would melt and shift around her to let them in, but he did not press the issue.

“Come now,” he said. “Let’s go in together.”

Before he could do so, someone high above noticed them, and shouted, “Ahoy!”

"Ahoy!" the boy shouted back.

Up on the city walls two soldiers squinted down at them. "Ability users!" cried one, his voice wavering with the wind. "Whose side are you on!"

The girl and the boy looked at each other.

"Do you know of a mirror that grants wishes?" the girl cried back at them. Her voice was like a drop of clear water, undulating in the wind.

The guards were silent.

"Who told you of such a thing?" one of them cried.

The boy tensed. The girl stepped forward to shout back up towards them, but the boy tugged at her sleeve and shook his head. He heard the discordant notes - they were off tune.

"Shall we leave?" the girl said to him. The ground beneath them glowed a warm gold, and her soul coiled gently around them in shifting hues of coral and red-violet.

The boy slid his palm over hers.

The girl looked at him in alarm, her soul darkening to a deep wine. Something was wrong.

For the first time in a long time the ground beneath them bubbled, and the dust began rising up around them, like a

shield. But before the particles could complete their path, the metal gates in front of them began to rise, and a small figure stepped out. The child had soft, black hair and wore an oversized tunic. The child smiled at the girl, touched his palm to his head, and extended his palm away again.

The girl realized that the child could not speak.

"You - " said the boy.

Back when the boy was still young, the sounds in his world had so overwhelmed him that he could not distinguish "real" sounds from the sounds he heard, and so never learned to communicate, because he never realized that people were communicating to him. He lived in a world of sound, inundated by the constant whirl of noise, and knew only that the sounds around him changed depending on how he acted, and where he went. It wasn't until one day, when the music near him actively changed, that somehow a part of the song made sense to him in a way it had never done before.

"They are speaking to you, you know," whispered the music.

The boy wanted to speak back, to ask "who are you?", but he did not know how to change the music as it had done. And for the first time he realized he was lonely.

"Listen," murmured the music. "Hear the words."

The boy listened.

In time, he learned how to speak.

+

"You know him?" said the girl.

The mute child smiled at them, placed his right palm over his chest, and moved it in a circular motion. Then he pointed at them, pointed at himself, and cupped one hand, slipping his other hand into it.

"He says please come inside," said the boy, and as he turned the girl caught a glimpse of his pupils beneath his lashes, milky white and unseeing.