My Sad Older Brother and the Big Sister Who Vanished

♪Poet (10 years ago to half a year ago)♪

My older brother is trying to have me killed. He is a very pitiful man.

My name is Poet. I am the second prince of the Rabbit Kingdom.

My older brother was meant to inherit the throne. I, meanwhile, was free to live as I pleased, and when I came of age, I would be subjected to a formal trial so as to prevent a power struggle, cursed in the throat and stripped of my voice, then sentenced to exile on a remote island, where I would spend the rest of my life in lonely isolation. Such was the custom for second and third sons of the royal family, passed down from generation to generation.

In this world where music is performed through magic, my brother spent his days receiving an elite education in male vocal magic and studying the arts of kingship.

“Must be nice, Poet. All you do is play around.”

“Well, once I’m an adult, life’s going to be hard. I’ve got to enjoy myself while I can. Hang in there, big brother. I’m cheering for you.”

“You’re kind, Poet.”

I cradled an acoustic guitar, held a blues harmonica to my lips, and played folk songs.

When I was a child, instrumental magic became widespread.

In a world that had once known only vocal magic, instrumental magic was an epoch-making invention. It gave many minorities a chance to stand against male vocal magic: women who had been forced to live in its shadow with only female vocal magic, and ethnic minorities whose vocal cords were ill-suited to magic, among countless others.

That said, it was still an emerging technology, something new and unfinished. If you wanted to rise into the upper ranks of society, the proper path was to study male vocal magic and the classics, like my brother Sonnet, and cultivate refinement and learning.

Anyone who studied instrumental magic was treated like a social outsider. If they looked quiet and timid, they were labeled nerds. If they looked rowdy, they were branded delinquents.

Time passed, and we became adults.

Then common sense turned upside down.

The skill of instrumental magic users began to be recognized. One after another, they rose as an emerging power, while those who had climbed the ranks through vocal magic fell into decline.

The Rabbit Kingdom was no exception. A fierce debate erupted over whether I, not my brother, ought to inherit the throne. Terrified, the vocal faction—that is, my brother’s followers—sent assassin after assassin after me.

Poor brother. He had killed his own true self and worked so hard to master vocal magic. Could the flow of time truly be this cruel?

☆ ☆ ☆

♪Poet (Present)♪

Beneath a sky full of stars, a campfire crackled bright red in the forest. Apparently bears roamed this area, so I casually cast up a magical barrier.

This deep in the mountains, assassins were unlikely to come.

I had nowhere to go. Mine was a journey of pure flight. A journey of nothing but running away.

“What am I even doing...?”

If I returned to the kingdom, my brother would surely be persecuted. That was why I wanted to go on living like this—quietly farming in some faraway country village.

An owl hooted softly, as if telling me this place was safe. Reassured, I drifted off to sleep.

I dreamed.

It was a dream I used to have often as a child, but one I didn’t remember seeing even once after I grew up.

A beautiful older girl stood in a lovely garden, reached out her hand to me, and smiled sweetly.

“Ms. Adagio.”

For some reason, I knew only her name. A mysterious woman I could meet only in dreams.

“I am a little bird trapped in a cage. Ah... I long to spread my wings and soar through that great open sky.”

She lowered her eyes sadly, so I took her hand and tried to encourage her.

“One day I’ll come for you. We’ll take each other’s hands and travel freely together.”

Then, after we shared a tender kiss, she smiled at me sadly.

“Wait! Don’t go! Don’t disappear!”

She turned away weakly and vanished, as if it were an eternal farewell.

I woke up. The campfire had not yet gone out.

A fleeting dream. I probably hadn’t slept even fifteen minutes.

I had started dreaming of kissing Ms. Adagio when I was six years old. Since then, I had grown older and become an adult.

But the Adagio in my dreams never aged.

Little by little, I had drawn closer to her age—then passed it.

To begin with, the age gap had never been one that could have made us lovers.

From the day I reached puberty at thirteen, I stopped dreaming of her. I figured my heart had simply matured. They say imaginary companions in childhood are called imaginary friends, so she was probably something like that.

And yet, here I was, seeing her again for the first time in seven years.

Would it be too romantic of me to think I might meet her soon?

It felt as though the god of music was guiding me toward where she was.

Yes. Perhaps this was a prophetic dream.

But if this was a prophetic dream, did that mean her vanishing was prophetic too?

No...

I wanted to see her. But what if the day we met was also the first step toward our eternal parting?

I couldn’t shake the sense of dread.

I was twenty, and she was eighteen.

For some reason, her age came to me with perfect clarity. That meant we could date normally.

Oops. No, that won’t do. That was just a dream from my childhood. I need to grow up. I am an adult. Adults should be interested in the news.

I casually cast a news magic spell through the guitar in my hands, and words appeared as a hologram.

It was reporting on a criminal escape. The fugitive had apparently committed murder at the Ministry of Magic. His name, it said, was Allegro.

Huh. Why did that name sound familiar?

Then I remembered.

When I was little, I had gone on a tour of the Ministry of Magic. The one who had guided us around was Mr. Allegro. He was a man, and yet for some reason, just holding hands with him made my heart feel at ease—and race, as though I were touching someone of the opposite sex.

“Mr. Allegro, thank you for today. Can I come again sometime?”

He had looked surprised, but replied, “Sure.”

After that, I remembered visiting a few more times.

How nostalgic.

I smiled at the memory—

And then I heard it.

A woman’s scream in the distance.

It was so desperate it sounded like a plea for her life.

My ears shot upright, but I couldn’t make out every word. I caught only a single phrase.

“...King Sonnet...”

Why was my brother’s name being spoken here, of all places?

Dropping to all fours, I kicked off with my hind legs and raced at full speed toward the sound.

☆ ☆ ☆

♪Allegro (10 years ago)♪

My name is Allegro. Hard as it is to say about myself, I am a young man burdened with many troubles. My superior subjects me to power harassment, and my days are filled with grueling black-company labor. There is darkness in my heart.

That darkness grew so deep I began hearing voices.

“You really shouldn’t push yourself so hard. Times are tough right now. Maybe you don’t need to work so hard on building your career. Maybe you could just go back to the countryside.”

“Shut up! What would you know about how I feel?!”

The other personality born from the darkness in my heart—Adagio—was butting in again where he didn’t belong.

I’m a man. So Adagio is a man too. Of course he is.

Among us dragonfolk, when someone carries darkness in their heart, another personality is born. And if the cause of that stress isn’t resolved even as time passes, that personality begins to grow.

There is an old legend that when those personalities mature and a decisive rift forms between their opinions, they split into two separate people.

And when that happens, each one’s body changes to match their mental age and the gender of their heart.

Well, that’s not going to happen.

And even if, by some tiny chance, we did split, both Adagio and I would obviously become middle-aged men.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

We dragonfolk men are proud.

If it ever became known that one of us had the heart of a woman, it would be a humiliation.

I wouldn’t go so far as to kill myself over it, but I’d probably want to crawl into a hole and never come out again.

In any case, it’s nothing more than an old legend you can’t really trust.