A Guild of Moonlit Shadows (A KOTLC FanFic)

~14~Memories Woefully Untouched

(Don't cue the music until it says so)

Sophie took small steps towards the piano that shone in the gentle moonlight. The windows were all open in the ballroom, light glowing the beautiful flooring and ornate pillars, gold and silver caressing the walls and pillars.

But it was woefully untouched.

Not even Maria had been in here recently, holding one of her grand events.

But it wasn't the quiet room that caught her attention.

It was her piano.

Hers.

Her grandfather loved to play it when they visited Renisanca from the Grecian countryside with Maria and Allesandro. But after their parents were executed, her father couldn't look at it; it hurt him too much. But after he saw his own daughter radiate towards it, her father did everything he could to make sure she could enjoy it.

She loved it when she was little, she loved plinking at the keys and combining them, making short ballads or tunes. Her father got her pages upon pages of written music, technique books. He knew little about the instrument himself, but he and Sophie learned together. Sophie never forgot a musical piece, the ones she made, or the ones she read.

Sophie glanced at the red velvet chair collecting dust near one of the pillars, well worn and comfortable. Her father would sit in that chair for hours, listening to her play, or just enjoying the rays of sun or moonlight coming through the floor to ceiling exquisite windows right at the edge of the stage.

Sophie tucked a blood-soaked strand of hair behind her ear and lifted herself onto the elevated stage, her muscled arms rising her in one smooth motion.

She ran her hands over the off-colored white keys, over the top and edges of the piano, just trying to remember the feeling of it. The blackened base topped with golden swirling decals and feet. Under the lid was a painting done by the crafter of the instrument, explicitly done for her grandfather.

She stared at the bench; the dust settled on the soft cushion.

Sophie glanced around, noting she was alone as ever.

She turned away from the piano, starting to jump off the small stage, but something stopped her.

She didn't know what it was, but her gaze kept flickering back to the piano. And she almost felt like an absent-minded impulse to sit on the bench. Sophie felt the shadow of her younger self sitting on the same bench nine years past, the last time she touched the instrument.

The whisper of the last time Sophie played these keys echoed in her memory.

She was wearing a new dress Maria made; her father was sitting in his chair in the corner of his room, listening to her practice and reading. She was having trouble performing a crescendo in her written music, having trouble focusing in general. She was hung up about what Daralice told her earlier in the day, how she taunted young Sophie about her mother. And how she broke down on this very bench, her father cradling her as she wept. She wanted what the other kids had; they had the fancy full family with both parents and happy siblings-

But her father reminded her of her own family, that their families are dull. That theirs was genuinely full of love, no matter which parent was there or not.

Sophie's dirty finger pressed on a key, the sound echoing through the empty ballroom.

It rung familiarly through her head, a memory of a lifetime ago.

Her other hand pressed on two different keys, complimenting the note that still echoed through the room. Her hands stilled, hesitant to continue.

There was a reason she stopped playing in the first place.