The Taxidermist's Chant

Chapter 1: A Debt of Song

Chapter 1: A Debt of Song

You wake with the taste of copper on your tongue, and for a moment you think the old wound in your mouth has reopened. But no—your tongue is whole, soft and wet against your teeth. The copper is memory. The copper is the song you sang three nights ago, the one that crawled out of your throat like a dying thing and somehow, impossibly, saved you.

You do not remember the song. You remember the silence before it, the crowd of faces blurred by torchlight, the priest’s hand raised to strike. You remember the moment you opened your mouth expecting a plea, and instead a melody poured out—a melody you had never heard, in a voice you had never used. The crowd wept. The priest lowered his hand. And you, Pich, musician of no particular renown, walked away with your soul still inside your ribs.

But debts do not dissolve in silence. They calcify. They wait.

You find the note pressed beneath your door at dawn, written on a scrap of palm leaf in a hand you do not recognize but somehow know. Come to the workshop. Bring your flute. The debt is due.

No signature. No threat. The threat lives in the absence of one.

You dress in the dark. The room you rent is small, the walls stained with monsoon damp, the single window shuttered against the gray light. Your flute lies on the mat beside