Songs in Borrowed Tongues

No one spoke their own words,

Morning arrived in fragments already worn by smooth centuries. The market of Choir opened in borrowed refrains. Hands exchanging bread, salt, flowers, and fish moved to the rhythm of words older than memory. Children chasing one another through alleyways flung scraps of melody over their shoulders like stones. Lovers leaned into one another beneath archways and offered lines that had belonged to a hundred mouths before theirs. Even sorry seemed to arrive pre-written, carrying its own tune.

No one said exactly what they meant. Nothing was ever new.

To an outsider, the city might have sounded beautiful.

To Mira, it sounded haunted.

She had grown up inside that music and had long since learnt how to move through it, selecting the correct lines for gratitude, apology, hunger, fatigue, affection… Everyone did. The wrong lyric at the wrong time could make a room go still. The right one made life glide onward as if language itself could fly.

Yet, the older she became, the more she noticed the seams.

There were moments when a person’s face did not match the song they used. Moments when grief wore a lyric too elegant for it. Moments when fear hid inside a refrain meant for joy. Whole lives seemed to pass that way, dressed in garments cut for other bodies.

Mira worked in the Archive of Refrains, where all approved lyrics were kept, sorted, restored, and catalogued. It was a place of thin light and patient dust, where the shelves rose so high they vanished into shadow. The air always smelled of paper, wax, mildew, and rain trapped long ago in stone. She spent her days repairing split bindings, transcribing decayed notation, and recording the lineage of old songs.

Lineage mattered in Choir.

Every lyric had to come from somewhere.

Or so she had always been told.

It was the nameless ones that unsettled her first.

A winter hymn with no attributed composer. A mourning song labelled only traditional. A harvest refrain with six documented revisions but no original text. Again and again, she found the same little absences sitting quietly in the margins of the Archive’s certainty. Here and there, a line of notation would vanish into uncertainty. A note in the catalogue would admit, with remarkable reluctance, that the earliest source was unknown.

At first she told herself it was nothing. A gap in record-keeping. A damaged manuscript. A simple failure of history.

But the absences accumulated.

Soon it seemed to her that the whole city had been built on immaculate repetitions surrounding a central omission no one dared nor wished to name.

The question entered her mind slowly, then all at once.

If everyone borrowed, who had been first?

After that, the Archive changed. Its silence felt less peaceful than complicit. Mira began to notice locked cabinets she had never been permitted to open, shelf indexes that skipped whole numbers, references vanished collections. The oldest custodians moved with the caution of people tending not merely knowledge, but a wound.

In the restricted stacks below the main hall, she found ledgers that recorded song families the way noble houses recorded bloodlines. Verse descended from verse, refrain from refrain, all branching backward in elegant chains. Yet some chains ended abruptly. Not in a documented source, nor a broken manuscript, but in a blank.

No precursor listed.

No attributed marker.

Nothing before.

The discovery lodged inside her like a shard of ice.

She began staying after dusk, when the building was emptied and the corridors took on a cathedral hush. Candlelight made the bronze catalogue plaques glimmer. Shadows gathered in the joints of the stone. Somewhere overhead, rain dragged its fingernails across the windows. Mira moved deeper each night, following discrepancies like footprints in the sand.

What frightened her was not merely the possibility that the city’s songs had unknown origins.

It was the sense that people knew.

Not everyone, perhaps. But enough. Enough to build procedures around concealment. Enough to place certain records below floor level and behind barred doors. Enough to wrap absence in ritual and call it order.

At the farthest edge of the underarchive, hidden behind a cabinet of decaying liturgical notation, she found a narrow door whose lock had long since surrendered to rust. Beyond it lay a chamber scarcely larger than a pantry. No catalogue lantern burned there. No shelf marker identified the room. The air had the stale stillness of a space forgotten deliberately.

Inside were thirteen objects.

They did not resemble the rest of the Archive. There were no illuminated manuscripts nor lacquered cylinders, no gold-tooled hymnals nor temple copies. These were cruder things: a clay table, a burnt plank, a strip of knotted fibre, a sheet of hammered tin, and a vellum scrap. All so old they seemed made of onion skin and dusk. Each carried a fragment of text. Each had been preserved with an almost fearful care.

Mira read them one by one.

They were not songs, not really. Or not the kind Choir recognised as songs now. They had no ornament, no proper metre, and no reverent polish. They were bare little utterances. A warning against the cold. A note of astonishment. A statement of absence. A reaching hand made verbal.

They felt unfinished.

Or perhaps they felt more finished than anything else in the building.

For a long time Mira sat on the stone floor with the thirteen fragments spread around her in the lantern glow. Above her, the city slept inside its secondhand melodies. Down here…

Down here, in the dark, she had found something that did not sound borrowed at all.

The thought that rose in her was so simple it almost embarrassed her.

Someone had once needed words badly enough to make them.

Not adapt them.

Not inherit them.

Not choose from a sanctioned body of approved language.

Make them.

She should have resealed the room and spoke of it to no one. Instead she returned again and again, until she knew the fragments by heart. They pursued her through the city. She heard them beneath everything. Beneath the fishmongers’ choruses and temple invocations, beneath lovers’ old ballads and children’s skipping songs, and even beneath the polished inheritance of generations.

Underneath it all was the shape of a silence that had once been broken.

And if it had been broken once, it could be broken again.

The idea terrified her.

It also made the city look fragile in a new way.

For the first time she noticed how often borrowed lyrics failed in private. A mother comforting a child with words too ceremonial to soothe. A physician delivering terrible news in a verse so antique it sounded embalmed. A mourner using an exquisite lament while their face strained under the effort of fitting pain into a familiar shape. Everywhere she looked, people were translating themselves into approved music and leaving the most living parts behind.

The great mystery was no longer where the songs came from.

The great mystery was why everyone behaved as though origins were dangerous.

The answer hovered around her in pieces. In the way senior archivists flinched at certain questions. In the formal gaps of the records. In the deliberate reverence surrounding repetition. In the city’s obsession with lineage, inheritance, and source. It was as though Choir trusted beauty only if it had already survived.

Anything new was suspect.

Anything new might still have teeth.

When the Festival of Return arrived, the city filled with lanterns and wet banners. Every year, the people gathered in the square to sing the foundational lyrics from which all sanctioned daily speech was said to descend. It was part ceremony, part oath, part reassurance. The same melodies. The same order. The same collective relief in knowing that nothing unforeseen had entered the bloodstream of language.

Rain threatened all evening but held itself above the rooftops.

Mira stood among the crowd and felt the thirteen fragments pulsing in memory like hidden embers. Around her, thousands of voices sang and braided together. The square became one vast mouth repeating what had already been spoken. The sound was magnificent, and in its magnificence there was something almost unbearable.

It left no room for beginnings.

When the final refrain ended, the silence that followed felt less like peace than it did suspense. Clouds pressed low over the city. Torchlight shivered. Somewhere in the distance, thunder dragged its body across the hills.

Mira stepped forward.

She carried no approved line.

That absence moved through the square before she did, a ripple of wrongness, of breached expectation. Faces turned. Breath stalled. Rain began at last, a fine mist silvering the air.

For one suspended instant, it seemed possible that the whole city might split under the strain of what had not yet happened.

Then Mira did the forbidden thing.

She spoke without borrowing.

The words were small. So small they might have been ridiculous if not for how completely they altered the silence around them. They named what was present. The rain. The fear. The terrible possibility that the oldest thing in the city was not tradition, but invention.

Nothing struck her down.

No holy fire answered. No stones cracked open. No heavens protested. The rain simply deepened, soft against the square, against the lifted faces, against the torches hissing at their own edges.

And in that wet stillness, the mystery shifted yet again.

It was no longer a question of whether a first voice had ever existed.

It was whether anyone else still possessed one.

For several heartbeats, the city remained frozen inside that uncertainty.

Then, somewhere in the crowd, another person abandoned the safety of inherited language. Then another. The new words came unevenly, awkward as newborn animals. They lacked grace. They lacked polish. But they carried something almost no one in Choir had heard in its raw state before: the exact shape of the moment that made them.

It spread without pattern. Fear. Relief. Wonder. Confession. Plain little truths, stumbling out into the rain. No chorus bound them together. No tradition caught them. Yet the square did not descend into chaos. It became, instead, strangely intimate, as though beneath all the city’s splendour there had been a buried human voice waiting for permission to exist.

After that rainy night, Choir did not abandon song.

If anything… song multiplied.

The old refrains remained. People still turned to them for ritual, for comfort, for memory, for the tenderness of belonging to something older than themselves. But new lyrics began appearing too, and they carried the rough pulse of present life. Kitchens and workshops, hospital beds and doorsteps, bridges and funeral paths and lovers’ windowsills all became places where language might begin again.

The thirteen fragments were eventually brought into the light. Scholars argued over them for decades. Priests called them dangerous, then sacred, then inevitable. Historians tried to weave them into respectable genealogies. Musicians set them to elaborate melodies they had never asked for. The city, being a city, did what cities do: it turned revelation into institution as quickly as it could.