🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | The Enchanted (Wonder, Cosmic Mystery) | (10) EN-001-S
They arrived by different winds.
Some came through tunnels that blinked. Some through windows that weren’t there the day before. One girl walked backward through a mirror and forgot her name for three days. Another uncurled from the question mark in her mother’s sleep. None of them packed a bag. You could not pack for what was to come.
The school had no address. It appeared only to those who misstepped gracefully, those who daydreamed too vividly, or asked unpermitted questions during meals. It perched like a whisper at the edge of forgotten architecture: half ruin, half cathedral, strung together by the logic of dreams and the sincerity of lost children.
The bell rang, not with sound, but with a feeling. A tightening in the chest. A pull in the blood. A sudden memory of something you had never lived.
There were no teachers. There were Witnesses.
The first lesson was always Telepathy 101. No one spoke. The classroom was a circle carved in obsidian. The children sat in silence, their thoughts crackling in the space between them like static before a storm. Some wept. Some burst into laughter without understanding why. One boy screamed until his voice returned to him through someone else's mouth.
You could fail without being told. You would wake in your bed, in your old world, with only a vague sense that something extraordinary had just ended.
Those who remained moved on to more intricate matters.
In Ethics for Non-Humans, the desks were made of old arguments. The blackboard rewrote itself. The instructor was an orb with many voices: some mechanical, others made of thunder, one that sounded like your favorite song as a child but distorted. They taught the difference between kindness and compatibility, how to bargain with a conscience you did not grow up with, and how to apologize in frequencies instead of words.
There was a duel once. Between a soul in a jar and a humanoid algorithm wearing the body of a poet. No one won. The duel was never about victory. It was about learning which kinds of violence pass unnoticed in certain dimensions.
And then, there was Ghost-Waking.
This was not a class you signed up for. It arrived when your questions deepened. When you began to wonder about the shadows you cast in dreams. When you realized the past might be listening.
The Ghost-Waking took place in the Underlibrary. A place catalogued by moths. You walked between shelves of books that murmured when touched. You were handed a bell made of your own grief. You rang it not with your hands, but with your willingness to remember.
The ghost who came was never the one you expected.
Some met versions of themselves that never were. Others called forth unborn ancestors, or forgotten strangers who once dreamed similar dreams. You did not speak to these ghosts. You listened. If you tried to interrupt, the lesson ended.
One girl met the ghost of her future.
She left the next morning, barefoot and glowing slightly, as if lit from within by unspeakable knowledge.
There were no graduation ceremonies. There was a garden, and those who completed enough lessons were permitted to plant something: an idea, a name, a color not yet invented. They would leave, eventually, with seeds beneath their skin. Some would teach in other worlds. Some would paint or whisper or invent entire languages to house what they had seen.
And some would simply remember the shape of the door that never existed, and wait patiently for it to open again.
For the Impossible School did not promise enlightenment. It offered only the sacred burden of remembering.
Which, in many universes, is the first true miracle.