The Lyre That Played the Void (Η Λύρα που Έπαιξε το Κενό)
-From the Meletic Tales.
They said she was born during a memorable night without the stars, when the sea held its breath and even the wind forgot to whisper. Her name was Myrine, and from her earliest days, she was marked by silence—not the absence of sound, but the presence of a deeper stillness that lingered in her wake and harmonies.
Her dwelling stood at the edge of a modest seaside village—no more than a gathering of whitewashed homes that huddled close to the Aegean, as though fearful of being forgotten by the world. Fishermen cast their nets by day, and their wives patched sails by moonlight. Life was as constant as the rising tides, but it was Myrine who gave the village its only echo of mystery.
Unlike the others, she did not gossip or crave wealth. She was a lyrist, though her lyre was unlike any other. It bore no ornamentation, no ivory trim or golden leaf. Its frame was carved from olivewood bleached by salt, and its seven cords were not spun from sheepgut or horsehair—but from old sailcloth, stripped from the ships long wrecked and forgotten, their journeys stilled by fate.
It was said that she fashioned each cord with a fond reverence. Some had belonged to sails torn in storms, others from vessels that never returned. The fabric had once caught the wind, guided men towards distant lands, and now, under her hand, they were repurposed to catch the silence between the notes played.
She never played for coins. She never played for applause. When Myrine’s fingers brushed her lyre, she did not coax melodies into being—she summoned gaps. Spaces. Voids. Her music was not solely of sound but what remained when sound had stepped aside.
Her music was the symphony of nature, and the tunes that her delicate fingers would play.
Those villagers who listened described it differently. One old potter wept, claiming he had seen the face of his dead daughter in a dream that night. A widow smiled for the first time in years, clutching her chest, as if some fragment of her heart had returned anew. A young boy who had never spoken uttered his first word the morning after hearing her play, with her soothing fingers.
Her fame rippled quietly. Travellers came not in caravans, but in silence, drawn by wordless instinct. They did not know what they sought, only that something inside them had long slept—and Myrine’s music had the key to rouse their intrigue.
Myrine lived simply and modestly. She ate little, slept little and rarely spoke. Once, during the last moon of summer, a philosopher from Rhodes visited her, compelled by tales of the music that was not known music.
He found her sitting beneath a fig tree that stood alone, restringing one of the cords, her touch precise and slow, like someone threading fate itself.
'Why do you play what cannot be heard?' He asked gently.
She did not look up. 'I do not play for the ear. I play for what lies beneath it', she told the man.
He furrowed his brow. 'Then what do you awaken with your music?'
She paused. The breeze shifted. The sea exhaled. 'I awaken the forgotten soul. Truly, not the one that remembers, but the one that has forgotten itself'.
Then she played. The philosopher never spoke of what he felt, only that it changed his life. He returned to Rhodes and dismantled his scrolls. Instead of writing treatises, he began to study Meleticism, the philosophy that was spreading through the villages. He said wisdom lay in roots, not rhetoric.
There was a child named Linos who lived at the edge of the village. Born without speech, he seldom responded to others. Most thought him dim, and some pitied his mother for raising a child who would never speak her name in public.
Linos would often sit near Myrine’s door, content to be still amongst others. He did not knock or call out. He simply waited, sometimes for hours or sometimes entire days that elapsed.
On the seventh day, Myrine came and placed her lyre in his lap. She did not instruct him. She did not speak. She simply walked away.
Linos looked at the cords made from lost sails. He brushed them with uncertain fingers. The lyre did not sing. This had peaked his curiosity, but that night, he dreamt of a lantern floating across a moonless sea. Inside it, his voice flickered—waiting.
In time, he would learn to strum not with the hope of sound, but with the trust of stillness. He grew into a silent man whose music was known across the coastal isles. They called him the rememberer of time.
Years later, nine wanderers came seeking Myrine, each from a different city and bearing a different grief or loss. One had lost a child, one had betrayed a friend, one had grown deaf to joy. Together, they asked her to teach them—not how to play, but the art of how to listen.
She gave them each tasks. One was told to walk backwards along the shore for a day, to see the present only after it had passed. Another was instructed to carry a bowl of seawater across a mountain without spilling a single drop. A third was told to sleep for seven nights without dreams or nightmares.
Only one completed her task. A woman named Lydia sat beneath the fig tree for nine nights and heard nothing but wind, but she did not grow restless. On the tenth morning, she rose and bowed.
'You have heard', said Myrine.
The nine dispersed, changed. They founded sanctuaries, offered teachings in silence and refused all titles, but they were known collectively as the circle of nine voids.
One unforgettable evening, with no actual warning, Myrine sat on the seawall and played her lyre facing the horizon. The villagers gathered without needing to be summoned. Old and young, stranger and friend, they all sat in reverent quietude
The music that night was unlike anything she had played before. It was the sudden sound of departure. It was the hush before a farewell. It was the silence one hears before waking from a recent dream.
When she finished, she placed her lyre on the stone, turned to the sea and walked into the water ahead. The waves parted and closed without a ripple to be displayed.
The lyre remained. None dared touch it.
That night, the stars returned to a dormant sky that had gone dark for a month. Fishermen swore the tides changed. Babies born that night bore birthmarks shaped like olive leaves.
Myrine was gone, but not lost. She had become part of the space between. Some people say that she entered the water to be taken away by the rising tides of that night, others say that a fisherman had taken her to a mysterious island.
Long after her departure, the village flourished—not through wealth, but through awakening. Songs were sung softer in their melodies. Meals were shared without need for actual speech. Arguments faded quicker, and silences stretched long and kind in their presence.
A young girl named Thessa, barely twelve, found the lyre one day, untouched and sun-worn. She brought it to her chest. It made no sound, yet her dreams were full of voices—her ancestors, her unborn children, the wind as it truly was. She learnt to play, but she listened as if the world itself were the song that struck the chords with her delicate fingers.
The lyre passed from soul to soul—not to be mastered, but to be remembered. Not with music, but with meaning. Not echo, but essence. And the void? It plays on.
In Meletic thought, To Ena—the One—can only be approached in contemplation. The path is not paved by what is said, but by what is left unsaid in one's consciousness. Myrine's life was not a doctrine. It was a pause, a question with no answer, a moment where the state of being remembered itself.
Her music was no offering. It was simply a mirror in which others saw the hollow gaps of their soul—those intimate absences which made space for the truth to be felt and expressed.
To this day, in some coastal shrines and grove altars, visitors gather on moonless nights. They do not chant. They do not speak. They simply sit and contemplate the beauty of the cosmos.
Sometimes, just before dawn, they hear the faintest sound—not quite a note, not quite silence, but something in between. A void strummed. A soul stirred. A whisper, long forgotten, remembered once more.
The years passed, then decades. The fig tree beneath which Myrine once strung her lyre had long withered, its trunk hollowed and grey, but children still circled around it in play, and elders paused before it as if it still bore edible fruit.
Thessa, the girl who had found the silent lyre, never left the village. She grew into a woman with hair like dusk and a gaze that held not memory, but remembrance—a wordless knowing that echoed through her presence. She never claimed to be a successor. She did not seek pupils, yet one by one, they came with a great passion to learn.
Some brought instruments, others brought grief. One brought silence so deep it bordered on despair. They came not because she summoned them, but because something in them stirred when the wind turned a certain way, or when they dreamt of shorelines with no impressed footprints.
She accepted them all, not with words uttered, but with the same stillness Myrine had carried. For she, too, had begun to understand that the transmission of awakening was not taught through dialogue—but through atmosphere.
In time, Thessa crafted a second lyre. It had no divine strings, and yet, when she held it in her hands during the solstice vigil, the entire village fell still and listened to the gentle melodies that she played.
A wandering sage from the Peloponnese, blind in one eye and bitter from long study, witnessed the ceremony in silence. Afterwards, he scoffed. 'This is nonsense', he said. 'What is so special about her lyre that I fail to understand?'
A merchant nearby replied, 'She played the music that comes from the soul. We heard what we had lost'.
The merchant remained three days. On the third night, he wept at his reflection in a bowl of rainwater. Not for what he had become, but for who he had never allowed himself to be.
Before departing, he carved a spiral on a stone at the edge of the village, saying only, 'Now I begin my journey, but with my soul to accompany me'.
When Thessa grew older, she no longer held the lyre. It sat on a shelf in her quarters, bare as bone, unplayed. She no longer needed it to convince others of the emptiness of their souls.
Instead, she listened. Not to others, but to the world that was present. She would listen to the beat between cicadas in the olive groves, the moment between thunder and rain, the hush that follows a child’s first step in life. These things were the notes of a higher melody.
The village changed again. This time, not by her hand, but by her presence. At the bathhouse, people spoke less and sighed more. At the harbour, sailors reported dreams that seemed not their own—but filled with recognisable longing.
The baker began shaping bread into rings—circles with hollow centres—calling them void loaves. He said they fed not the body, but the gap within the absence of the soul
One autumn, seven figures approached from the northern path—cloaked, silent and wearing emblems in the shape of wind-blown sails. They were the last of the circle of nine, or so they claimed. The others, they said, had vanished into the inner landscapes. They did not ask to meet Thessa. They simply sat outside her quarters for three days. On the third night, she emerged.
The villagers held their breath, but there were no words. Thessa nodded once. The circle bowed in return, and one amongst them, a woman named Arianna, placed a smooth black stone in Thessa’s palm. Within it was a sliver of the sea, sealed in crystal—a fragment of water that had once kissed Myrine’s skin.
It was a gift not of power, but only of recognition.
'You are not the voice', Arianna said, her voice rough from years of quiet. 'You are the chamber it echoes within its melodies'.
Thessa wept—not for herself, but for the silence still unborn in others.
The Meletic sages later debated what had truly occurred in that village. Some insisted Myrine was a philosopher in disguise, embodying the ten levels of consciousness in her own awakening. Others said she was a Phainomenon, a luminous interruption in the natural flow of reality sent by To Ena itself.
Most agreed that her music had done what philosophy often failed to do. It awakened the innermost depth of the soul.
In the metaphysics of Meleticism, the void (kenon) is not emptiness, but a vessel itself. A cradle for truth. It does not negate existence—it prepares it. Myrine had simply offered it a form.
Her lyre was not a tool, but a portal. Her silence was not a pause, but an invitation. Her music was not sound, but the memory of meaning before it became form.
Generations passed. The lyre with no strings was preserved in the village, but never behind glass. It sat in a hollow niche in the fig tree’s remains, visited not by scholars, but by mothers with unanswered hope, by poets who had forgotten how to begin, by children who could not sleep.
Sometimes, when no one touched it, it vibrated—not physically, but inwardly. Those individuals standing near it felt it in their ribs. Like a breath waiting to be released. It was ineffable.
One winter, a boy named Peteos claimed he could see the strings—but only in the moonlight. No one else could, but when he described their shimmer—'like thread made of snow' as he put it—the elders simply nodded. He would become the village’s first studied philosopher. A singer who never sang, yet whose presence calmed storms of the soul with his words of wisdom.
After Myrine’s disappearance had passed into memories—although time meant little in the story of silence—a woman arrived from a far-off city across the western sea. She wore a cloak sewn with constellations and carried a single question, 'Did she know what she was doing when she played the lyre?'
She asked it of no one in particular, but an old man in the olive grove replied, 'She didn’t need to, for her fingers knew what they were doing'.
The visitor laughed. 'Then was she a mystic that played to the gods?'
Another voice answered—this time from a young girl, no more than ten, who had been braiding grass by the wall. 'She was neither. She was only listening to the cosmos'.
The woman said nothing more and left.
That night before she departed, she left behind a shell-shaped bowl filled with starlight and vanished with the dawn.
They say that when To Ena awakens fully in the hearts of all who remember themselves, the music of Myrine will no longer need to be played.
Because it will be heard everywhere—in the rustling of leaves, in the silence between footfalls, in the dream where one wakes weeping without knowing why.
It will not be a return of the lyre, nor the return of the woman, but the return of what was never lost which is the soul remembering itself through its presence.
And so it is said—wherever the sea leaves memory on stone, or where winds whisper through windows unlatched—Myrine passes again. Not as actual form, but as genuine feeling. Not as sound, but as sheer inspiration.
In distant cities, beyond the old maps of Ionia, some people speak of a melody they cannot hum yet cannot forget. A mother in Cyrene who rocks her child with a tune she never learnt. A mason in Thera who pauses his chisel as if awaiting a forgotten verse. A dreamer in Delos who wakes sobbing, hand clenched around a fistful of nothing—and finds peace in the emptiness.
These are her echoes. The void did not consume her. It received her, and what the void receives, it does not destroy—it holds.
As long as there are spaces between words, cracks between stars, pauses between heartbeats—her music remains.
The lyre without strings. The song without name. The silence that speaks.
In the silence that follows every life lived fully, every truth glimpsed briefly, and every soul turned inwards to remember—there lies her final note: Not an end, but a return. The lyre that had once belonged to Myrine was to be the instrument of the Logos and the Nous.
They finally placed the lyre in a place not of stone, but of silence—a circle of smooth earth beneath the open sky, where wind could pass through unbroken. No plaque named her. No altar was raised. Only a single olive tree grew nearby, its leaves whispering with every breath of the cosmos.
Visitors came not to play the lyre, but to sit beside it—to listen, not for melody, but for memory. For in the quietude that clung to its form, they sensed something waiting. Something ancient. Not a sound, but a knowing. Not music, but meaning.
It was said that those attuned to the Nous—the deep connection behind all things formed—could perceive the impressions left by her hands. Not as notes or harmonies, but as clearings in the noise of existence. Her lyre, even though stringless, became a mirror. It tuned the listener, rather than playing to them.
And so her presence endured—not as echo, but as emanation.
They called her not a musician, but a rememberer—for she had drawn sound from the space between all things, and reminded the soul of what it had forgotten: that the Logos sings even when unheard, and that in every act of listening, we are already on the path of return.
The lyre without strings remains, and within its silence, To Ena, the One still speaks.
Even now, when dusk settles like a breath upon the world, some say the air around the lyre vibrates—not with sound, but with presence. A presence not hers alone, but of all who have ever listened with their whole soul.
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