Under the sky-roofed caverns of Bras Basah, the sylph's brain lay encased in repeating bars of light. Some speak of her as a former university mainframe, salvaged from disused fintech rigs; others suspected she started out as nothing more than the long-lost bookkeeping server of the National Library's reference section.

With nothing left to process, she enveloped first herself, then her surroundings, into her lumic reckoning, singing of the piles of old books, broken glass, and carcasses of long-dead trains that lay around her. Those who scavenged around the chasms of the old Circle Line spoke regularly of windchime tones, evoking empty birdcages and eternally-closing doors, echoing from the shattered depths where rainwater fell across in curtains.

Throughout the years, the sylph-brain adapted, training the lights of its cage onto the corners of the ruined kingdom it sat on, devoting spare processing cycles to understanding its fey material logic beyond her old language of song. It was not an easy task, for stone and twisted metal resist representation in sight, preferring the language of reverb and echo to mask their hideous forms. Still she persisted, siphoning power from the station's backup generators, cataloguing every shard, every loose pebble and leaf, until she could sing their forms in light as easily as in song. The bars of her prison had become her release.

One by one, the broken glass pieces found their way into the old glass roof, and sunlight poured through for the first time since the long night, gushing into the station's belly as its passengers once did on moving stairs. Books found their way onto shelves, their pages unfolded and uncreased by luminous fingers once more. Birds filled broken cages; even the air conditioning turned on again, blasting cool air from the holes in the earth. For nights after that, they said, if you peered into the chasms of the Circle Line, you could witness the remains of her masterwork: sparks of freshly-shorted wires, the smell of ozone, the afterglow of burned-in station display screens.

She's gone now. In its place are a lattice of metal bars and a few fluorescent tubes, bolted on by pious pilgrims in a show of faith. There hadn't been fuel enough for her to last forever, not since the last generator ground to a halt. Among the carcasses of trains and great concrete ribs one finds only the whistle of wind and the thud of collapsing earth. A few stray wires is all that remains. She who once beheld the world is nothing more than a story, her song passed around camps of flickering gas lanterns at HDB void decks, or sung from parched lips along the Pan-Island Expressway. Still those exist who believe she never truly died. From their concrete towers, they keep their binoculars pointed towards the dark glass heart of the city, watching for the twinkling lights of stars.