Summary of Sing by Jules Bly
Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue #448, January 8, 2026
You are the singer of the song of all things, a continuous murmured chant in an ancient forgotten language that literally holds the world in existence. The song describes every event in the past, present, and future—and as long as these events are sung, they continue to exist. If your voice fails, the world vanishes. This is not a threat but an observed phenomenon.
The song was taught to you as a child by an old person who journeyed from the mountains to find you. Decades from now, when you are old, you will journey to teach a freckled child in turn. Because singing occupies your voice completely, you cannot speak and must communicate by writing. Most people find you strange and frightening. Unlike singers of generations past who were honored in temples and provided for, you must work to survive, taking dangerous mercenary jobs while maintaining the song.
The song shows you the future with perfect clarity. You know you will accept a doomed merchant caravan job, know the bandits will attack, know you will be struck with a cudgel but survive. You see it all before it happens, yet you cannot change it—the song describes only the one future that will occur, not possibilities or alternatives. You must act in accordance with the song, though you sometimes wonder if this is the song’s requirement or merely your own lack of courage to deviate.
Key Plot Points
- Lying injured after the predicted attack, you sing of a future encounter with a handsome blacksmith—and of the beast in the undergrowth that will one day kill him
- In frustration, you test whether you can change the song by singing a boulder out of existence; you succeed, but terror at nearly destroying the world makes you restore it and return to the ordained path
- An entity speaks to you—a survivor from the previous world, which vanished when a grief-stricken father couldn’t sing his children’s deaths into being
- Months later, you arrive at the blacksmith’s village as foretold, taking a job to hunt a monster; you and the blacksmith fall deeply in love and marry
- Years of happiness pass until the dreaded night arrives: a child is lost, you and your husband search the forest, and the beast attacks him as you’ve always known it would
As your husband bleeds to death at your feet, you face an impossible choice. You cannot stop singing or the world ends. But if you keep singing his death as written, your world ends anyway. You’ve always been careful, acting in accordance with the song. But your husband is reckless—recklessly loving, recklessly brave. You love him recklessly too.
You realize that although the song described the job notice and the merchant deaths, it was your own knowledge that brought you to the village early, your own choice to return to the blacksmith’s shop more often than necessary. Perhaps the song doesn’t dictate everything. Perhaps you’ve had more agency than you believed.
You frighten yourself. What you’re about to do is irresponsible. But you act recklessly for the first time in your life. You sing a different song—still singing of the forest, the village, your husband’s blood, but now also singing of his weight as he leans on you, of weeks recovering in bed, of months before he can lift his hammer again. You sing of a found child. The world does not vanish.
The entity observes a new phenomenon: perhaps the way the song has always been sung was itself incorrect. If you had obediently sung your husband’s death, that would have been the true failure. The song doesn’t demand tragedy—it demands truth, even truths you choose to create. Now you sing of bright spring days with your husband, his arms and gentle fingers, the light in his eyes when he looks at you. Your last words to each other have not yet come. You continue to sing the world into being, but now you sing it with love and hope, having learned that the greatest catastrophe is not changing the song, but failing to sing the life you choose.