The dream deepens.
No longer a shared hallucination — it is now a world of its own.
A memory. A prophecy. A trap.
Tralalero stands barefoot in the ruins of a Venetian ballroom drowned in moonlight.The chandeliers sway in water that isn't there.Music leaks through cracked marble — a lullaby no one dares hum aloud.
She is waiting.
She doesn't know why.
Her veil flutters — then lifts.
She is no longer wearing black.
She is in a wedding gown stitched from opera scores and seafoam.
Across the ballroom, Lirilì Larilà enters.
She is dressed in red.
Not crimson — but sacrificial red, like the cloth on altars before the saints are burned.
Her footsteps do not echo.
They harmonize.
They see each other.
Their breath catches.
Time stalls.
Somewhere, a clock begins to chime — thirteen times.
Lirilì speaks first.
"You remember it too."
Tralalero lowers her eyes.
"The first time we kissed… the sky cracked. The priests said the stars wept. The rivers flowed backward. They said we were cursed."
"No," Lirilì whispers."They were terrified. Because love that powerful rewrites God."
They approach.
Slow.
Breathless.
Tralalero raises her hand, touching Lirilì's cheek.
The air around them bends — as if the dream cannot hold what's coming.
Their lips almost meet.
Almost.
Then:
A blade sings through the dream.
It is not metaphor.
It is not symbolic.
It is Capuchino Assassino.
Drenched in holy oil.Mask painted with stigmata.Two pistols holstered.A blade forged from a broken communion chalice.
He leaps from the shadows between time.
"NO."
"IF THEY KISS, THE WORLD ENDS."
Lirilì flinches back.
Tralalero snarls — not human, not beast, but siren.
She shields Lirilì with her body.
"I will end the world," she hisses, "before I let you touch her."
But the dream-world cracks like glass.
The ballroom floods with fire.
A thousand eyes — holy, profane, unborn — open across the walls.
And the kiss does not happen.
Again.
Capuchino lunges. His blade pierces Lirilì's chest—
But there is no blood.
Only music.
One long note escapes her mouth as she collapses.
Not a scream.
Not a sob.
A song.
The true first note of the Final Score.
Tralalero catches her.
Holds her.
Weeps — and her tears are made of the sea.
"They keep stopping us," she whispers.
"They don't understand," Lirilì murmurs faintly."We're not the end."
"We're the choice."
And then she fades.
Not dies.
Not disappears.
But fades — like a voice at the end of a tape, stretched and unwound.
Tralalero is alone.
The dream burns around her.
And from the sky of that dream, Bombombini's voice falls like rain:
"I know where the kiss must happen."
"And I know who will die if it does."