No Mimic

In the village of Othrys, the dawn light, a sickly, bruised purple, pushed through the cracks of a crumbling wattle-and-daub hut. Lyras moved to the corner, his fingers brushing the coarse, fraying wool of a blanket before finding the leather-wrapped bundle he had kept hidden beneath the floorboards. He unwrapped it with the reverence of a priest unveiling an idol. The lyre, carved from the seasoned wood of a mountain cedar and strung with the sinew of a goat, caught the first weak rays of the sun. It was his mentor’s—a man who had died in the gutter, clutching a cup of wine he couldn’t afford, still whispering lines of The Iliad to a stray dog.

Lyras lifted the instrument. It felt heavy, not with wood, but with the suffocating gravity of expectation. Every scratch in the frame, every wear-mark on the neck, was a reminder of a life spent in the shadows of giants. He didn’t want to be a vessel for the dead; he wanted to be the voice that stopped the living in their tracks. But he knew the world. The world didn’t pay for the songs of a nobody from a dust-choked village. The world paid for the familiar, the established, the gods.

He gathered his few possessions: a woolen cloak matte...