Elias sat in his boat, weeping, as the bay filled with light and the town woke to find they could suddenly remember every tune they had ever lost.
The seventh line. He didn't know the words. There were no words on the papyrus. But his grandmother's ghost, or the memory of her, or the tide itself, put them in his mouth: aghany mnwt
On the sixth line, the stone spoke.
The phrase meant nothing in the modern tongue. It was a ghost of a dialect that had died two generations ago, a whisper from the clay tablets his grandmother used to trace with her finger. "Songs of the Still Tide," she had called them. "The music you hum when the world holds its breath." Elias sat in his boat, weeping, as the