Rome is quiet at dawn.
Too quiet.
The birds are missing.The fountains run black.The sky above St. Peter's Basilica flickers between centuries.
And the bells ring.
Twelve times.
For the twelfth pope.
But the current pope, Benedictus XIII, still breathes.
Barely.
His Holiness lies in a gold cradle of intravenous relics, half-suspended above the Sistine Chapel. The ceiling has peeled — not painted, peeled — revealing layers of forgotten angels behind Michelangelo's final brushstroke.
Benedictus twitches.His lips form a name no one hears.He whispers it backwards.
"Alaril… Iliril… Lirilì…"
The cardinals lower their eyes.
They know the rite.
In the crypt beneath the chapel, the College of Inverted Cardinals — faceless men in black stitched with the names of extinct saints — prepare the funeral for a pope not yet dead.
It is a preemptive funeral.
A ritual appeasement.
They believe if they bury the papacy before Fate claims it, the End might stall.
But the marble beneath the altar is already cracking.
And the incense smells like burnt flesh.
The choirboys sing in Latin.
But the words aren't Latin anymore.
"When the seventh sings, and the eighth bleeds, the ninth will open the gate."
"One voice can break a world. But two?"
"Kiss. Collapse. Communion."
Watching it all, from the shadow of a Vatican archive shelf no one has dared open in 400 years, stands Capuchino Assassino.
His hat is off.
His blade is sheathed.
And in his hand is a locket that cannot open — sealed with wax and sin.
It belonged to Lirilì Larilà.
It pulses in time with the pope's heartbeat.
"He's already dead," whispers a voice behind him.
Capuchino turns slowly.
A nun.
Her face is gone — eaten away by prophecy. Her hands are white-gloved. Her smile, intact.
"But not buried," she adds, placing a candle into his palm.
"You can still stop it, you know."
"Stop what?"
"The kiss."
Capuchino laughs bitterly.
"You've never heard her sing."
The nun smiles wider.
"No one has — not all the way through."
At that exact moment, the candles in the Sistine Chapel gutter and die.
The pope opens his eyes.
They are empty.
He sits up.
He screams.
The scream is not human.
Above the Vatican, a white dove falls dead from the sky.
It hits the ground beside a growing fissure in the cobblestones — a crack shaped like a music note.
Inside it, Tralalero Tralala begins to hum.