Ashleigh stood at the edge of a road that no longer met itself. The cobblestones split down the middle, one half tilted up toward the sky, the other sunk into damp earth. A merchant cart had fallen into the gap and been abandoned, fruit rotting in the crack. This was Melody, the kingdom a single song had once kept whole, and the song had broken into seven notes while she was somewhere else. She would not say where. She had spent four days walking the outer roads with a folded map and a borrowed coat, asking after anything strange — lights, sounds, a hum in the water — and four days hearing only complaints about the cracks. Seven notes. No direction. The kingdom was coming apart faster than her feet could carry her, and she had nothing to chase. She sat on the broken curb to eat the last of her bread, and a butterfly landed on her wrist. Its wings were pink and blue, marked with pale rings, and it held still long enough for her to notice it was humming. Not buzzing — humming, one clean pitch, low in her bones. She did not move. The butterfly lifted, drifted a body's length down the road, and waited. She stood. It moved again. When she stepped off the path toward the southern fields, the hum stopped; when she turned east toward the river, it sang. She tested it twice more to be sure. Then she pulled the map from her coat and marked the eastern road with a smudge of charcoal. "East," she said, to no one, because there was no one. Her hand shook against the paper. She had no proof the butterfly knew what it carried, only that for the first time since the song shattered, something in this kingdom was pointing.