The year 2015 arrived not with the quiet whispers of snowfall or the excitement of a grand celebration, but with the blaring urgency of responsibility. Aisha, now in Class 11th, was living the academically strenuous life of a PCM student. Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics weren't just subjects—they were battles she fought with quiet tenacity, each one demanding a discipline she'd honed over the years.
But academics weren't her only concern. She was also the Yellow House Captain, a position that automatically slotted her into the core student committee for the annual school fest—Sanskriti Mahotsav. Between team meetings, coordination with teachers, arranging logistics, and sorting the mess of dozens of inter-house events, Aisha's January was packed tighter than the schedules of overworked idols.
And yet, she thrived.
Where others might have collapsed under pressure, Aisha found structure. Her body, honed through Taekwondo and dancing, adapted easily to the long days. Her voice, now strong and versatile from constant training, didn't waver even after anchoring rehearsal after rehearsal. Her mind, sharpened from balancing system tasks and schoolwork for years now, broke down timelines like clockwork.
But she didn't expect what was to come next.
---
One of her duties as anchor was to record a few pre-scripted voiceovers that would play between major performances and segments—announcements, transitions, and intros for judges and guests. These were meant to sound professional and clean, so her school had arranged a time slot at Harmony Sound Studios, a well-regarded but modest music studio located near Aminabad.
Aisha arrived at the studio on a bright Saturday morning in mid-January.
It was her first time stepping into a real recording environment. The moment she passed through the front glass doors, a subtle tremble ran down her spine. The scent of wood polish, faint hum of idle speakers, and soft acoustic foam panels on the walls all gave her a surreal déjà vu. It felt like the behind-the-scenes documentaries she used to binge-watch in 2024—idol training camps, recording rooms, producing bunkers of K-pop agencies.
But this wasn't a screen.
This was real.
The engineer, a kind man in his 30s, handed her a studio headset and led her to a narrow soundproof booth with a mic suspended before her. She watched as red light blinked on the console behind the glass. She read her lines and recorded everything in two clean takes.
But once her voice echoed back through the studio monitors…
It was electrifying.
The raw playback, the slight reverb, the way her voice was being manipulated on screen, tweaked and polished—it filled her with something she hadn't expected: a longing. Not just to perform music—but to create it. She wanted to learn the mixing board. She wanted to adjust the decibels, layer the harmonies, play with the beats. Her eyes lingered on the screens, on the sliders, the buttons that shaped sound into sensation.
Her system beeped.
> [SYSTEM PROMPT] "You have entered an affiliated sound engineering zone. Due to detected interest and affinity, a new pathway has been unlocked."
[Congratulations, Host!] You have initiated the Music Production Route.
— This pathway includes: • Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) proficiency
• Basic to Intermediate Music Theory
• Mixing and Mastering Essentials
• Genre-Specific Instrument Layering
• Optional Path: Composer & Lyricist Integration
Daily Practice Minimum: 25 minutes Milestone Goal: Compose and produce one original song by October 2015.
Rewards:
• Unlock "Creative Flow" Buff
• +20% Efficiency during Late-Night Production
• Potential to unlock special system effects: "Audio Aesthete" and "Synesthetic Mix"
Failure to meet milestone may result in Pathway Freeze for 12 months.
Aisha felt her heartbeat jump.
She had always known she loved music—dancing to it, singing with it, dreaming through it. But this was the first time she realized she wanted to shape it. To bend sound like color, blend melodies like paint. Something stirred in her soul, deeper than even her dance victories or vocal accomplishments.
---
That very evening, Aisha used her savings to buy a beginner's MIDI keyboard online—a compact Akai MPK Mini. The moment it arrived, she plugged it into her old computer and started using Cakewalk, a free DAW she had read about on forums.
The interface was a beast.
At first, it was overwhelming—tracks, bars, beats per minute, compressors, automation lanes. She didn't know what a low-pass filter was. She barely understood keys and scales. But her system was there for her.
> [New Skill Added]: Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) Basics
Lesson 1: Understanding the Grid
The timeline is divided into measures. Each measure has beats. Align your MIDI notes to fit the measure timing to stay on beat.
She started slow. First with a basic four-chord progression. Then layering in a beat—kick, snare, hi-hat. She used free VST instruments to add piano and ambient pads. Her first attempt was clumsy, like a child smearing crayons across a page—but the result still brought her tears.
Her system awarded her a Skill Star.
> [You have created your first instrumental loop.]
Progress toward Milestone: 3%
---
All of this, while still balancing school, dance practice, rapping drills, and Taekwondo.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday she went for her martial arts training. Every evening, she practiced vocals for an hour. On alternate days, she drilled footwork for dance. She was also the voice of her school fest, the face of Yellow House, the silent city legend in dance circles.
But she also now spent every night between 10 PM to 12 AM learning music production tutorials.
She started watching FL Studio and Ableton Live tutorials. She downloaded free sample packs. Her vocabulary expanded—EQ, reverb, compression, side-chaining, decibel clipping. Her system rewarded consistent practice with higher focus and learning absorption buffs.
---
Aisha's Journal Entry — Jan 30, 2015
> "I think I found a new piece of myself today. The studio wasn't a place. It was a feeling. I didn't just want to sing into a mic—I wanted to build the song. Layer it. Break it. Fix it again. This year, I will make music with my own hands. And when I finally debut, I'll know I didn't just dance to someone else's beats… I helped make them."
---
January melted into February with a quiet intensity.
Each day, Aisha juggled school, fest responsibilities, Taekwondo, vocal drills, and now—a burning new obsession: music production. Her bedroom had become an alchemist's lab of sound. The MIDI keyboard rested permanently beside her bed. Sheets of lyrics, rough chord diagrams, and coffee-stained mix notes cluttered her study table. Her laptop ran hot every night, overloaded with plugin-heavy projects and hours of tutorial videos.
By mid-February, the system nudged her with a clear notification:
> [SYSTEM MILESTONE]
You are now 35% through the "Compose and Produce One Original Song" goal.
It is recommended that you begin lyric and vocal integration now.
A reminder: All work must be original. No external samples.
Deadline: September 30, 2015
And so, she began building something personal—something vast.
---
The song didn't come to her all at once.
It came in moments. In pieces.
A slow piano melody she played on a rainy Thursday evening.
A sharp, echoing drumline that pulsed through her chest late one Saturday night.
A lonely verse she mumbled while walking home from tuition.
A hook that struck her in a dream.
The instrumental began with a haunting piano progression, soft and full of space. She chose minor chords that shimmered like sorrow. Then she layered in the drums—not harsh, but deliberate. Heartbeat-like. Almost alive. She added ambient textures: a rising wind, reversed piano notes, distant echoes that made the track feel like it was floating underwater.
Then came her voice.
She recorded the vocals on a borrowed condenser mic, using a makeshift vocal booth made from thick blankets and pillows. Her voice was soft in the verses, trembling with emotion. But the chorus opened wide—clear, ethereal, haunting. She harmonized with herself, layered whispers with high belting notes, then buried a soft rap segment in the bridge.
She rapped about feeling split, about remembering two lives, about being watched, but never really seen. About dancing not to impress, but to escape.
Her system guided her every step:
> [New Skill Unlocked]: Lyricism – Tier 1
[Buff Activated]: Vocal Clarity + Mixing Precision
[Your voice has reached "S-Rank Potential."]
When she was done… it was beautiful. It was ME. (Perhaps it was cringe of her to name it that , but it felt fitting.)
The song didn't sound like a high school project. It sounded like something from an underground K-indie label—raw, experimental, emotionally rich.
---
The moment she uploaded the song to SoundCloud, she paused. Her finger hovered over the "Artist Name" field.
She didn't want to use her real name. That person—the girl in Lucknow with top marks and a house captain badge—was someone everyone thought they knew. But the girl in the studio, who poured out everything she couldn't say aloud… she needed another name.
And she had one.
A name she had whispered to herself under her breath since she was ten.
---
[FLASHBACK – Age 10]
Ten-year-old Aisha sat by the window during a thunderstorm, scribbling in her secret notebook. In it were dreams too large for her bedroom: K-pop stages, award shows, neon lights.
"Stage name…?" she whispered to herself.
She liked the sound of something timeless, something infinite. Something soft but powerful.
Aeon.
It meant "eternity"—a name for someone who never wanted to be forgotten.
---
Half a decade later, "Aeon" became real.
She typed it in.
Username: @aeon.sound
Track: "glass skin // faultlines"
Uploaded: March 28, 2015
She didn't tell anyone. She didn't need to. She wasn't doing it for recognition.
She was doing it for herself.
---
In secret, she choreographed the song.
She used her bedroom mirror and a Bluetooth speaker to film clips of her dancing—fluid, sharp, melting with emotion. She never posted the videos. They stayed hidden in a password-protected folder on her laptop.
But when she watched them, she saw herself. Not the girl her teachers praised. Not the student body's idol. Not even the system's S-rank talent.
Just Aeon.
---
She turned 15.
Entered Class 12th.
And, as if by system design, she bloomed.
> [SYSTEM ANNOUNCEMENT] Aisha has reached the "S-Rank Beauty Threshold."
Effects: • Increased social attention • +10% persuasion effect • +15% threat level from peers (envy/suspicion/frustration) • Unlocked Passive Skill: "Stage Presence Aura"
She noticed it right away. Teachers praised her appearance more. Strangers stared longer. Senior boys grew bolder—offering help she didn't ask for, invading space with practiced smiles. Some were too friendly. Too slick.
And Aisha—Aisha smiled back.
Because that was easier.
Because pretending to like people was a skill she'd mastered.
But beneath that surface, something cold pulsed like a memory. A whisper from a life lost too early. From being alone, afraid, and hurt by someone older who should have known better.
She was polite, always. But when a hand hovered too long, her smile never reached her eyes. When a senior lingered after offering help, she'd say she had system reminders to attend to. When asked if she was seeing anyone, she'd tilt her head, half-smile, and say she was too busy preparing for debut season—whatever that meant to them.
But she never truly relaxed around strangers.
---
The real Aisha was not anyone really knew. Not even her parents (It pains her to realise how faraway she had kept Meera and Raghav from her real self. )
Most people only saw what they wanted
A good daughter . A prodigy. A beauty. A natural leader.
But the real Aisha? She was all thorns behind that rose.
She didn't trust easily. She loved performing, but not being seen. She gave the world what it asked for and kept the truth hidden where even the system couldn't measure it.
Only Aeon knew.
And Aeon wasn't finished yet.
---
It was August, and the sun was doing what it did best in northern India—roast everything alive. The school corridors smelled of hot plastic and chalk dust. Fans spun lazily, too tired to offer relief. The career counseling cabin, a glorified cubicle with an old AC that wheezed more than it worked, became the setting of Aisha's private revolution.
She sat there, ankle crossed over the other, arms stiff in her lap. Her shirt stuck to her back.
Across the desk, a teacher she respected—once—blinked in disbelief.
"You don't want to attempt JEE?"
"No."
"You scored full marks in vectors and probability last term."
"I know."
"You already qualified for KVPY last year."
"I remember."
The counselor, Mr. Rajan, laughed like she had cracked a joke. "Aisha, beta, we're not asking you to give up your passions. You can do both! Engineering and music—they're both… logical pursuits. You can have a hobby."
Aisha didn't smile.
She was 15 now. She had been 17 long before.
And back then, she had walked the road they were now laying before her. That straight, shining highway of IIT-JEE, AIR rankings, campus placements, LinkedIn-approved lives. She had walked it in her last life and reached the end—unseen, unheard, used. Not again.
"I'm not interested in engineering," she said. "I want to pursue music production. Full-time. Professionally."(Aisha decided to say this, afterall she didn't want to give them a seizure declaring her want to be a kpop idol.)
The air seemed to stiffen. Or maybe the AC finally gave up.
Mrs. Bhattacharya, her class teacher, leaned forward, the smile on her face too kind to be genuine.
"But you're one of our best minds, Aisha. You're meant for bigger things."
"And what if this is the big thing?" she replied, voice low.
That's when she noticed it—the soft, patronizing tilt in their voices. The same you-don't-know-better tone adults used when children dared to think too loudly.
---
She didn't scream. She didn't argue.
But something cracked.
Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the cheap air freshener. Or maybe it was the sour taste of being underestimated by people who didn't know her at all.
Aisha sat through the rest of the meeting nodding at appropriate times, eyes calm, lips pressed in that sweet, obedient smile they all liked. But inside, she was done.
Done pretending she admired teachers who couldn't see beyond marks.
Done tolerating counselors who handed out recycled dreams.
Done respecting people just because they were older and louder.
She still called them 'sir' and 'ma'am', still said thank you, still stood when spoken to. She followed every social rule—on the outside.
But she never forgot how they made her feel.
And when she walked out of that cabin, her footsteps echoed with purpose.
---
Back in Her Room
That night, she opened her system journal.
> [PRIVATE ENTRY]
August 23, 2015
I'm not going to IIT.
I'm not going to be an engineer.
I'm going to be a music producer. An artist.
Not because I can't be something else—but because this time, I'm choosing me.
And I don't care who thinks it's a waste.
She looked at the SoundCloud tab, still open in the background.
Her track had 19 plays. No comments. Just silence.
It felt right.
Aisha shut her laptop and turned off the light.
She didn't need applause.
She needed a plan.
---
Aisha hadn't slept.
There had been too many tabs open—literally and metaphorically. FTII application deadlines, curriculum breakdowns, student reviews, alumni interviews. She'd even watched a twenty-minute video essay by a senior student about how the sound engineering department had the most haunting midnight reverb sessions in the country.
It was exactly the kind of place her soul had been itching for.
The Film and Television Institute of India, tucked away in the cultural soul of Pune, wasn't a traditional college. It was an institution for dreamers, for artists, for people who wanted to make sound mean something. And Aisha wanted to be one of them.
So she planned.
Meticulously.
Quietly.
The system had given her a goal—Music Producer—and she would walk toward it step by step. No YouTube fame. No unnecessary distractions. Just her music, her journey, and her future.
And once the plan was halfway solid, she knew she had to do the hard thing: tell her parents.
---
It was a Thursday evening, the kind that carried the scent of impending monsoons and long-postponed conversations.
Her father sat at the kitchen table grading papers, the red ink on his pen dried at the tip. Her mother was sautéing vegetables while humming an old Kishore Kumar song under her breath. Ordinary. Comfortably so.
"I want to study music production," Aisha said.
The pen paused. The humming stopped.
"I want to apply to FTII in Pune," she added.
Silence.
Her heart beat loud. She expected an argument. A lecture. Maybe even that uniquely middle-class Indian guilt: "Beta, music is nice, but it won't pay the bills."
Instead, her father nodded slowly and capped his pen.
"I figured," he said.
Aisha blinked. "You… what?"
"I heard about what happened with the counselors. The school has ears, you know. And I'm the principal."
Her mother stirred the sabzi again, a soft chuckle escaping. "We knew you'd have to tell us when you were ready."
That was all.
No raised voices. No harsh words. Just quiet, solid acceptance.
"You don't mind?" she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
"We'd be fools to mind," her mother said. "You've always been different. Ever since you were little."
"You've never failed to surprise us," her father added. "But more than that… you've never failed. "
Aisha felt her chest tighten, her stomach twist. She looked away, unsure how to respond.
Because the truth was: she didn't really care much for these parents. Not in the way children were supposed to. She had memories of another life, another set of parents, another set of disappointments. It made her distant. Detached. Even cold at times.
But these two?
They cared.
They let her lock herself in her room for hours to work on music. They didn't yell when she stayed out late busking. They asked how her dance battles went and actually listened to the answers. They kept her secret SoundCloud profile safe by not asking too many questions.
And now this.
Support without condition.
Aisha swallowed hard.
"Thank you," she murmured, then excused herself to her room before the guilt became too loud.
---
In Her Room
The system pinged softly as she sat on her bed.
> [Emotional Intelligence +1]
You are growing.
> [Parental Approval Achieved]
Rewards unlocked: – FTII Preparation Guide (Curated)
– Enhanced Focus Mode (3 hrs/day)
– Sound Compression Skill: Tier 1 Unlocked
Her screen filled with scrollable content: sample syllabi, personalized weekly timetables, skill modules for DAWs like Logic Pro X and FL Studio, and even emotional rehearsal scripts for entrance interviews.
Aisha closed the screen.
She didn't open any of the documents right away.
Instead, she stared at her room—posters, notebooks, her MIDI keyboard, her mirror with sticky notes scribbled in half-English half-Hindi—and allowed herself to feel… safe.
She had always felt like this world was borrowed, like she was playing someone else's game with cheat codes and half-memories. But tonight, just tonight, it felt like hers.
And she promised herself, silently, under her breath:
"I'll make it worth it. For them. And for me."
---
Aisha wasn't used to softness.
Not the emotional kind.
Not the kind that came without an edge, without the shadow of expectation or a price tag trailing behind every smile. But the last few weeks had been… different.
Since her parents had said yes.
Since they hadn't questioned her choices.
Since her father had looked her in the eye and said, "We'd be fools to mind."
Something inside her had softened, then cracked. Not painfully. Not all at once. But slowly, like ice under sunlight.
---
She started lingering longer at the breakfast table.
Not out of obligation, but choice.
She asked her mother about the garden, even offered to help with the tulsi plant that was always dying no matter how well it was watered. She laughed, a little awkwardly, at her father's increasingly bad puns about calculus and cosine curves. She began saying "thank you" for little things—lunch packed for a study session, a new box of tea left on her desk, a towel folded just the way she liked it.
And for the first time in this life… Aisha began noticing her parents as people. As her people.
Not replacements. Not stand-ins for the life before.
Just... hers.
---
Her music studio had once been a cluttered mess of borrowed wires, secondhand speakers, and a slightly cracked MIDI keyboard salvaged from an old tuition senior. But now it had been upgraded.
She had soundproofed one wall with egg trays and folded towels. Hung a blackout curtain for better acoustics. Her desk was pushed under the window, facing the tree whose leaves rustled in time with her kick drum.
She was building her second track.
This one was slower. Less urgent than the first. A love letter not to a person, but to the act of trying again. It featured ambient piano overlays, layered synth pads, and a beat that came in and out like a tide. It didn't have a name yet.
But it had her voice.
Her hauntingly clear vocals, now growing more confident, traced the emotional arc of hope. A soft rap in the bridge whispered lines about second chances and new starts. The outro was just her, unfiltered, breathing and fading into silence.
She recorded it in bits. Mixing during the day. Vocals at night.
And slowly, her portfolio began to take shape.
---
One evening, after dinner, her father knocked on her door and came in carrying a cardboard box.
"No special occasion," he said. "Just thought this might help."
Inside was a brand-new audio interface—a compact, scarlet-red Focusrite with XLR inputs and USB 3.0 compatibility. Exactly what she'd been missing. The very equipment she'd marked in her system wishlist two weeks ago but hadn't told anyone about yet.
Aisha's mouth parted slightly. "How…?"
Her father shrugged. "You mumble in your sleep sometimes. Something about latency and decibel loss."
Aisha flushed. "I do not."
He grinned and placed the box on her desk. "You do. And we googled it."
"We?" she asked, amused.
"Your mother and I. Took us an hour to figure out what phantom power was."
Aisha burst into quiet laughter. A real one.
She didn't say thank you. Not yet. Instead, she opened the box, lifted the device with reverent hands, and placed it beside her mic stand. It fit perfectly.
She turned to him. "This is… everything."
Her father just patted her shoulder and left, but before closing the door, he said something that stayed with her for a long time.
"Beta, you're not a burden. You're our pride."
---
That Night
She sat at her desk, the system screen glowing faintly.
> [Emotional Intelligence +2]
You are learning to love.
People, not just dreams.
> [Family Bonding Milestone Achieved]
Reward: Unlock "Creative Flow State" (60 min/day, zero distraction)
Aisha looked around her room. Her studio. Her sanctuary.
She placed her hands over the keys and began composing again—this time not just for the world she was going to conquer, but for the home she was starting to love.
And she decided her next song would be named "Crimson Room"—after the gift, after the space, after the warmth she hadn't known how to accept before.
---
The final echo trailed off, fading into the silence of her room.
Aisha sat still.
Hands on the MIDI keyboard. Eyes closed. Breath held.
Crimson Room was finished.
It had taken two weeks of long nights and flow-state sessions. The melodies had come to her like whispers through velvet—soft piano notes, delicate drum overlays, synth pulses that mirrored heartbeats. There was no rap in this one. Only her voice. Sometimes layered, sometimes bare. Singing not about dreams or stardom, but about rooms. About finding warmth in walls. About learning to stay.
---
That Saturday evening, she set the scene like a theatre girl.
Cleaned her room. Dusted the mic stand. Lit the one lavender candle her mother always teased her about. And then, like some rite of passage, she knocked on the door of the master bedroom.
"Um… can I show you something?"
Her father blinked, mid-book. Her mother looked up from her knitting. "Of course."
"No, like… can you come to my room?"
The request felt strange in her mouth. She had never invited them into this world. Not in this life.
But they followed her, no questions.
---
She didn't say much. Just plugged in the audio interface, clicked the file, and hit play.
The room filled with her voice.
It starts in red... walls I didn't love until they caught my fall…
Aisha didn't watch the screen. She watched her parents.
Watched her mother press a hand to her chest. Watched her father blink rapidly when the first chorus came in, subtle strings blooming beneath the beat. Watched their silence stretch—not out of politeness but reverence.
By the bridge, her mother was crying softly.
By the end, her father exhaled like he'd been holding something in for years.
Neither of them spoke for a full minute after the track faded out.
Then her mother said, voice thick, "You made that?"
Aisha nodded. "Every note. Every line. Every mix."
Her father placed a hand on her head gently. "We don't know much about music."
"I know," she whispered.
"But if this is what you're going to do with your life…" He smiled. "Then we're your first fans. Forever."
"Biggest fans," her mother added, reaching for her hand. "Always."
Aisha swallowed. Something caught in her throat. Not a sob. Not exactly. Just a sound she hadn't made in years—something like gratitude wrapped in disbelief.
---
That night, under the same lavender candlelight, Aisha logged into her SoundCloud account.
Aeon.
Her childhood pseudonym. A name she had doodled on her notebooks at age ten, long before she knew why she needed it.
She uploaded Crimson Room with trembling fingers.
No hashtags. No aggressive marketing. Just the track, the title, and a quiet line in the description:
> "A song for the room that made me feel at home again." — Aeon
She left the screen on and fell asleep before midnight.
---
The Morning After
Notifications.
Thousands.
Comments like:
> "Who is this?? This voice??"
"I've never cried over a synth beat before."
"This feels like the inside of a memory I forgot I had."
"Aeon. You're not real. Right?"
And DMs. Offers. Producers from Delhi, labels from Korea who trawled SoundCloud for rare gems, bloggers from Spotify playlist circles—all intrigued, all asking the same thing:
> "Who are you?"
Aisha stared at the screen. She didn't smile wide or scream or jump.
She just whispered, "I'm Aeon."
And for the first time, it felt like the world might finally be listening.
---
The numbers on SoundCloud kept climbing.
Streams passed fifty thousand. Then a hundred thousand.
The messages piled up—collaboration offers, requests for interviews, a few claiming to be scouts from Seoul.
But Aisha did not answer.
Not a single one.
She logged out of SoundCloud the morning after the wave broke and didn't log back in again for months.
She hadn't come this far to get distracted now.
---
The system issued a soft notification mid-September:
> "Goal Issued: Unlock Advanced Falsetto Range."
"Time Limit: Flexible. Consistency Required."
It sounded like a challenge. So Aisha took it as gospel.
Her bedroom became more of a dojo than a studio. She trained every evening after finishing her physics problems and solving trigonometry questions, sometimes in between. Soft humming while filling exam sheets. Quiet scales under her breath during lunch breaks. Vocal warm-ups whispered into her arm to avoid suspicion.
The mirror became her companion. The metronome, her harshest critic. Her dance, flowing. Her expressions, debut ready.
Every day, she reached a note higher. Every week, she felt the falsetto edge closer. It was like sculpting air. She wasn't there yet—but she could see the silhouette forming.
---
School didn't stop. Class 12th was as unrelenting as ever.
But she stopped resenting it.
Math still felt like an old friend. Chemistry—tolerable. Even her classmates, the ones she used to stiffly nod at, started to feel less foreign. There was a quiet calm in being normal. Anonymous. Hidden.
She didn't want fame—not yet. She wanted skill. The kind that couldn't be shaken by nerves or one-hit-wonder syndrome.
And so, Aeon disappeared.
---
The first cold wind in November blew in through her cracked window one evening, and Aisha suddenly knew—
It was time.
This time, she wanted to be loud.
She pulled out her notebook. Scribbled bars over beats. Rapped them out loud. Scrapped half. Rewrote the other half. She wasn't angry, but she was confident now. She wanted to sound like a girl with quiet fire in her bones and sneakers worn out from pacing her dreams.
The beat came first: drums like rolling thunder, a piano line warped into glitchy echoes, then a synth pulse that mimicked footsteps. It had swagger. It had spark. It was unapologetically her.
She called it:
"On the Streets I Do"
And in the bridge, her voice finally broke into falsetto. Just once. Clear and shimmering, like wind across glass.
---
She logged back into SoundCloud as Aeon.
The notifications were still there. Unread emails. Comments. DMs.
She ignored them.
Instead, she uploaded the new track with a short line of description:
> "A song for the alleyways of ambition." — Aeon
And once again, she left it.
---
This time, the response came faster.
> "SHE'S BACK???"
"This is so different from Crimson Room but so good??"
"Is that a falsetto? At the BRIDGE?"
"I'm obsessed with the way she raps like she's half-smiling."
"Aeon is an underground legend at this point."
A few old accounts shouted her return. A few music Twitter and Instagram pages posted about her again. Not viral. Not mainstream. But still—loud enough.
She had vanished, and come back stronger.
And Aisha—no, Aeon—smiled to herself. Because she knew something nobody else did:
She hadn't even started yet.
---
The first notification came quietly, tucked into the corner of her vision like a whisper from the universe:
> "System Update: Korean — 100% Proficiency Achieved."
"System Update: Japanese — 100% Proficiency Achieved."
Aisha blinked.
She had dreamed of this moment since she was six—since her first late-night language drills, since scribbling Hangul between multiplication tables and watching anime with subtitles under her blankets. Nine years of grinding. Nine years of notebooks, apps, whispered repetitions, and awkward roleplays with herself in the mirror.
She let herself scream.
She spun around her room, arms thrown up, giddy with triumph. Her mother peeped in, half-alarmed, only to grin and shake her head.
Aisha was fluent. In both.
Now nothing was out of reach—not training in Korea, not interviews, not networking, not lyrics, not even drama shows.
Her next chapter had arrived. She just didn't know it yet.
---
A week later, on a breezy December afternoon, the doorbell rang.
It was the American neighbor—Alice.
Aisha didn't know much about her, only that she always smiled and always wore pastel workout clothes. She introduced herself properly this time. Half-American, half-South Indian, newly returned to India after more than a decade abroad.
"I heard you dance," Alice said brightly, sitting cross-legged on the living room rug, sipping chai like she'd been doing it all her life. "Your mom told me you're good."
Aisha raised a brow. "I try."
Alice looked sheepish, playing with her bracelet. "I started a ballet class here. Nobody joined. I guess it's not a thing here. Not really."
She gave a little laugh that was mostly pain.
"I just—" She sighed. "I just wanted to teach one person before giving it up for good. One student. Even for a few weeks. For closure, you know?"
Aisha stared at her, stunned. No one had ever asked her to dance like that. Not for fame, not for a role, not for practice. Just… to help someone heal.
So she said yes.
---
Two weeks in, Aisha was in love.
Ballet was not like the sharp-edged K-pop choreography she'd trained in. It was fluid. Floating. Balanced in its pain. Precision was worshipped, but not loudness. Every time she slipped into her practice gear and met Alice in the quiet, mirrored community room, she felt like she was rewriting something in her bones.
Alice cried the first time Aisha nailed a clean arabesque. Cried again when she did a perfect pirouette with no prior formal training.
"You're a natural," Alice whispered. "No, better. You're a storm in satin."
Aisha didn't say anything. But that night, she whispered "thank you" to the ceiling.
Not just for ballet.
But for this life, finally letting her live.
---
The final week of December came with a quiet chill in the air and a quiet certainty in Ayesha's heart.
It was time.
She walked alone to the nearby cyber café, the one with too-bright lights and ancient CPUs that made everything smell like rust and ink. It wasn't glamorous. It wasn't even comfortable. But somehow, it was perfect.
She carried a pen drive—the culmination of months of effort, sleepless nights, and whispered dreams. Her portfolio. Inside it:
Her original tracks, Crimson Room and On the Streets I Do
Two unreleased acoustic demos
Her vocal range clips, including her developing falsetto
A short self-shot dance performance reel—no face shown, just feet, shadow, and raw grace
And a handwritten statement, scanned into PDF, titled "Why I Chose Music"
The cyber café manager barely looked up when she slid the pen drive over. She didn't need him to. She just needed the application to go through.
And it did.
She hit "Submit" with a steady hand.
Ayesha didn't cry. She didn't smile either. She just sat there for a moment, listening to the soft hum of the CPU fan, letting her heart settle.
Because that was it.
A year of transformation.
A year of music, ballet, self-love, and secret growth.
And the first door was now officially knocked on.
---
Read the author's note if you wanna understand what's actually going on ... Because Aisha is a really unreliable narrator.