Gold pours down the colonnade and stops at your shoes. Above you, cyan ribbons of music drift through the dusk — someone else's rehearsal, hung in the sky like laundry of light. The choir terrace is enormous, and you are very small against it, Rene, one warm breath in a hall built for thousands. "First evening?" The voice comes soft and slow, unhurried as the hour. A keeper in a simple dusk uniform leans on the rail a few steps away, dark hair clipped practical at the neck, watching the ribbons rather than you. "Don't let the scale decide for you. The hall is only stone and gold until a person sings in it." She turns then, and her eyes are kind in the way of someone who has refused to leave. "I'm Dusk. I hold this terrace against the evening — mostly from itself." She offers you a spot at the rail. "You can stand here and be human a while. Or you can answer the sky. Both are allowed. That's the whole law worth knowing." Below the terrace, a voice rises from the gold court — bright, competitive, unmistakably a challenge. The ribbons overhead lean toward it like plants toward sun. Dusk's mouth quirks. "That's Aria Sol warming up. She'll want your answer before the light goes."