"The absence of sound is never quiet when your heart remembers the song."
The space station above Planet Reia shimmered like glass. Cold, angular corridors wound through silent chambers, lit by pale white strips along the floor. Everything here felt too clean, too sterile. There were no street performers, no background advertisements with catchy jingles, no hum of idle humming. The station, like the world below it, had been built to suppress one thing.
Music.
Jimin walked slowly beside Taehyung, their footsteps echoing just enough to remind them they were alive. Every time their conversation became too warm, too playful, a pair of floating drones would pause and observe. The two had learned to whisper carefully, to laugh behind closed doors, to avoid attention.
But the hardest part was not the silence outside. It was the pressure inside—the ache of knowing the others were still out there, scattered, possibly in danger, possibly worse.
"Do you think they can still hear it?" Jimin asked softly, running his hand along the smooth metal of the corridor wall.
Taehyung glanced at him. "The melody?"
Jimin nodded. "That faint hum. The one that brought me to you."
Taehyung gave a small smile. "I think it's still playing. Somewhere deep. Like it's waiting for us to remember the next verse."
They passed a holo-board displaying station rules. Most were typical: no weapons, no smuggling, no unauthorized exploration. But one line stood out in glowing crimson text.
"Unauthorized tonal emissions are prohibited. Harmonic activity will be met with immediate correction."
Jimin exhaled slowly. "They really are afraid of it."
Taehyung stepped closer, lowering his voice. "I asked a local merchant why music was banned. He wouldn't say much, but he gave me this."
From his coat, he pulled a small shard of black glass etched with faded runes. He placed it into a portable reader. Static played for a moment, then a garbled recording began. It was old, crackling, and distorted, but beneath the noise, a gentle melody flickered. Just a few notes.
Even that much was enough to bring a lump to Jimin's throat.
"I remember that," he whispered. "We sang it once. Before."
"Exactly," Taehyung said. "It's from us. Or something close to us."
The device began to beep. A small warning flashed on the screen: Emotional surge detected. Please seek equilibrium therapy.
Taehyung quickly shut it off and slipped it back into his coat.
"They're watching more than just our voices," he muttered. "They're tracking our emotional frequencies too."
Back on the desert planet Arkatra, Namjoon stood at the edge of a broken research facility, a silent wind brushing dust across his boots. His makeshift camp overlooked a canyon of forgotten tech, filled with antennae, relics, and shattered instruments no longer in use.
He had spent weeks decoding lost frequencies. Quiet songs embedded in data cores. Rhythmic pulses hiding in solar flares. The deeper he dug, the more he realized this galaxy had once been alive with sound.
Now it was all muted.
Namjoon opened his journal, lines scrawled in multiple languages. One page was titled, Federation of Harmonic Silence: Timeline of Erasure.
It started with a war.
A civil war had broken out between colonies. It wasn't fought with guns at first. It was fought with ideas. Rebellion had spread through melody, voices united by sound. Ballads that turned into protest. Choirs that turned into revolution. Music had become too powerful to contain.
So the Federation silenced it.
Every known tonal frequency associated with heightened emotional states had been scrubbed from public access. Devices that played or recorded sound were dismantled or regulated. Composers were reprogrammed. Instruments were melted into components.
Music had not just been banned. It had been erased.
Namjoon looked up at the canyon and whispered, "But not completely."
Inside a collapsed observatory beneath the dunes, he had found the faint trace of an encoded pulse. One note. Perfectly preserved.
He played it back on his handheld.
It was warm. Familiar. It resonated with his core.
"I know this frequency," he said. "It's them."
Somewhere in orbit above the ice fields of Zeffra, Hoseok moved through a gravity simulation facility. It had been abandoned for decades, but its kinetic chambers still functioned. As he floated mid-air through a rotating gyrosphere, he could feel something tugging at him. Not just gravity. Rhythm.
Every movement he made sent a slight pulse through the space. Every flip echoed back. He began to play with it. A footstep. A shift of weight. A twist of his wrist. Slowly, the rhythm grew.
But then came the warning.
A drone zipped into the chamber, flashing red.
"Unauthorized harmonic patterns detected. Cease movement. Report for calibration."
Hoseok grinned. "You think dancing is dangerous?"
The drone repeated the warning.
He kicked off from the wall and spiraled through the chamber, laughing as he moved. The air seemed to pulse with him. For just a moment, the silence cracked.
Then the drone shot a stabilizer net at him. He twisted mid-air, dodging, and escaped through an emergency hatch.
Panting, he leaned against a wall outside the chamber and muttered, "Okay. They're really serious about this no-vibes policy."
At the edge of the mining world Nollis, Yoongi sat on a crate in a hidden tunnel, tinkering with a broken soundboard. The walls were dark, lined with sound-dampening panels. Every step echoed like footsteps in a dream.
He struck a key. Nothing happened.
He rewired it, pressed it again. A small pulse vibrated through the floor. Low. Faint. But real.
Yoongi closed his eyes.
It wasn't a song yet. It was just a note.
But in this galaxy, even that was rebellion.
In a distant lab orbiting an artificial moon, Jungkook stood in front of a holographic projector. Around him floated blueprints of ancient sound weapons, some made of light, some of solid bass frequencies. None had been seen for centuries.
He touched one.
His hand glowed faintly. The star mark on his wrist pulsed.
The blueprint reacted.
He watched in awe as the weapon began to assemble virtually, based only on the rhythm of his heartbeat. His voice caught in his throat.
"They designed weapons from music?"
A robotic voice answered. "Before the silence, music was everything. Creation. Destruction. Power."
He turned. The lab was empty, but the voice continued.
"Now your presence has reactivated dormant systems. Your sound signature is incompatible with this era."
Jungkook narrowed his eyes. "What does that mean?"
"You are not supposed to exist."
He reached out and played the last note of the simulation.
A spark exploded from the console.
The galaxy shuddered.
And far above them all, in a hidden citadel built from crystal and shadow, a council of figures watched the readings spike.
One stood, masked and robed, eyes hidden.
"The frequencies have returned," he said.
Another whispered, "Then the Silent Note must act."
The leader nodded.
"Let them sing."