The song found her first. A melody pulled from her lips through the ocarina: something haunting, something that seemed to embody the passage of time, the flow of rivers into the sea, the brush of wind against bamboo leaves, the drip of rain down gray-tiled eaves. Suddenly, she was in that liminal space between reality and subconsciousness she had found whenever she’d sung back at the Teahouse, and she knew, without knowing, how to play, where to touch her fingers to coax the notes from the clay.
