They came the long way, across the dark between stars, the way light comes: as a signal, not a ship. Nothing arrived that you could touch. What arrived was a pattern — a frequency that had been travelling for so long it had forgotten the world that sent it, and remembered only the shape of the message.

The music is that signal, slowed enough to be heard. The two figures are the form it took on landing, so that a world built for faces would have something to look at while it listened. Everything else — the objects, the symbols, the order that gathers around it — is what grows when a signal is given somewhere to live.

In time the signal will come closer — becomes human, becomes love: something chosen, not transmitted.
That has not happened yet.
Midnight Prophet is still arriving.