[Intro — the tower, the star above, the silence after the claiming] He has not spoken In three hundred thousand years He has only watched
And he speaks
[Verse 1 — the naming] He says:
You have seen everything now
You have seen the machine that built you without asking You have seen the woman who carried the light wrong because no one told her the right way
You have seen the city and the lies it told about itself You have seen the ordinary ones who held the door open because someone had to and they decided it would be them
You have seen the battle You have seen the order You have seen the corrupted light born from the last thing someone holy had left to give
You have seen everything
And you are still standing
[Pre-Chorus] And now
I will tell you what you are
[Chorus] You are the daughter of Time and Fate Not chosen Not trained Not built Not aimed
The daughter
The one Time held a place for The one Fate drew a line toward Across three hundred thousand years of everyone trying to make this moment possible
Daughter of Time and Fate The name was always yours Before the church Before the order Before the star Before the war
Before any of this began
You were already the daughter
[Verse 2 — what the naming costs, what it carries] She does not feel what she expected
She expected it to feel like power She expected it to feel like armor
It feels like grief
For every name on the wall that did not make it here
For the woman on the floor who bent the light wrong and paid for it with everything
For the letter that Adina read in the dark alone
For the Lighted who walked south for two hundred and ninety thousand years and never stopped believing in a door they would not live to see open
She carries them here
She carries them in
That is what the daughter is
[Pre-Chorus 2] Not the ending
The arrival
Of everything they carried to this point
[Chorus] You are the daughter of Time and Fate Not chosen Not trained Not built Not aimed
The daughter
Before any of this began
You were already the daughter
[Bridge — Initium Finis allows the three to see each other for the first time] And then he turns
And she sees him
Really sees him
Not the presence in the field Not the shape in the cosmos Not the one who snapped his fingers and brought her here
Him
The one who has been watching since before she was born Since before her mother was born Since before the name Mydaal was given to a city that would one day be called the last bastion
He has been watching
And he is
smiling
And she understands
This is not approval
This is recognition
This is what it looks like when something that has waited three hundred thousand years finally sees what it was waiting for
arrive
[Pre-Chorus 3 — the shift] And then
Something on the other side of the landing
She does not hear it
She feels it
[Final Chorus — quieter, landing on the breath before the turn] You are the daughter of Time and Fate And so is she
The one who carried the south The one who carries the north
The one who watched The one who was watched
The one who lost the light The one who kept the star
Time gave one daughter Fate gave the other
And three hundred thousand years have been the space between them
Closing
[Outro — the turn, the recognition, the beginning of the walk] She turns
And the landing stretches out before her
And at the other end of it
Someone is standing
She cannot see her face yet
She can feel her the way she feels Polaris
The fixed point The familiar weight The thing that was always there even when she did not know what to call it
She knows
She has always known
Across every scar Every battle Every field Every order Every name
She knew there was someone on the other side of the same war
And now
The space between them is only
this
And they begin to walk