"Because the Council of Patrons lied to you." Rook didn't turn around. "The Muses8 weren't supposed to be seven. Or eight. We were supposed to be nine . There was a ninth Muse once. The Muse of Destruction. Calliope's forgotten sister. She was erased from the myths because she refused to play by the rules."
"Still no word from the Council?" Vincent van Gogh's reincarnation sat cross-legged on the conservatory floor, bandaged hands smeared with cobalt blue. His Palette ability allowed him to pull objects from paintings, but today he'd only produced a single wilted sunflower. "They said the eighth would come before the Fracture." muses8 comics
She didn't play a concerto. She didn't summon ribbons of sound. She played a simple, halting melody—the first song she'd ever learned as a child, before the Council found her, before the powers, before the weight of a dead woman's legacy settled on her shoulders. She played it badly, with wrong notes and uneven tempo. And she let herself feel what she'd been denying for years: "Because the Council of Patrons lied to you
Rook smiled. It didn't reach her eyes. "I'm the Muse of Cuts . The spaces between frames. The silent panels. The moments artists erase but never forget." She held up the marble. Inside, a tiny galaxy spun. "I can step into the white space. The gutters of reality. And I can bring things back." We were supposed to be nine
"No." Rook crushed the marble. Time hiccuped. For one heartbeat, every student saw a version of themselves that had died young—Vincent with a bandaged ear, Clara in an asylum, Wolfgang feverish and bankrupt. "The Fracture is a wound. I'm just the knife that made it." That night, Clara couldn't sleep. She found Rook on the roof, staring at a sky that seemed slightly too close.
"The Fracture isn't real," snapped Agatha Christie's heir, a sharp-eyed woman named Mira who could weave Narrative Threads —literal strands of cause and effect. She tugged one now, watching a silver line loop around her finger. "It's a myth. A story we tell ourselves so we don't feel incomplete."
The Eighth Muse's Gambit