🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Time & Reality | (19) TR-004-F1
Once, in the inland empire of Revaal, the monarchy was determined by dreams.
Each dusk, the people knelt beside stone basins and submerged their faces in shallow pools of moonwater, whispering their fears like coins into the surface. The water remembered.
In Revaal, it was said that the only real things were those seen while the mind slept. Waking life was a test: a dense mirage built to train clarity through misdirection. Birth, trade, death: all theater. It was the dreamworld that bore the true laws, the true names.
And so, the next king or queen was not chosen by lineage, but by which child appeared most often in the dreams of others. This was known as the Law of Drowsing Kings.
Every seventeen years, the Dream Enumerators began their census. They moved in clusters across the empire, asking only one question: Whom did you see, and what were they doing?
The dreamers rarely knew names, only glimpses: A girl walking backward across a river of wolves. A boy who blinked and opened windows in the sky. A child who peeled back the sun to reveal a staircase. When patterns emerged, the child was found.
Once identified, the child was removed from waking life and placed into a sacred slumber, bound in silk and slow-root spores, suspended in the great floating sanctum known as the Draemhold.
No ruler of Revaal had ever spoken a decree aloud. They ruled through dream.
The girl called Nepheri was seen in the dreams of three thousand nine hundred and twelve citizens. More than any monarch before.
When they found her, she was living in the Valley of Folded Winds, her family unaware of her nightly reign. They wept with pride and disorientation as the Dream Enumerators carried her away in a cradle of woven sleepglass.
She did not resist. In truth, Nepheri had always known she was realer asleep than awake.
Inside the Draemhold, she drifted for thirty-nine years. While her body lay in gentle stasis, her dreaming self governed. Policies appeared in the minds of Revaalians like pollen on the breeze: a river rerouted, a famine quelled, an enemy made kin.
Dreams were the new codex. If five citizens saw a tree bloom in a desert, a grove would appear there the next week. If ten dreamed of birds flying backward, the air routes would be reversed. The laws emerged from her dreaming like steam from breath.
Until one year, she vanished.
Not from the Draemhold. Her body still slept, still hummed with biolight.
But no citizen dreamt her anymore.
The Dream Enumerators, frantic, began nightly rituals of ink-sleep and duststone in hopes of recovering her image. They found only blanks. Then, something stranger: dreams began arriving uninvited. Vivid, fractal, irreversible.
A clock made of crying glass. A tower filled with teeth. A sentence tattooed on every tongue: “The dreamer has awakened beneath the dream.”
Nepheri was dreaming within her dream.
And the laws began to unravel.
First, time began to bend in public spaces. Conversations repeated mid-sentence. Doorways reappeared where none had been. Crops grew into birds.
Then, memory itself began to ripple. Citizens remembered lives they had never lived: childhoods in oceans, weddings beneath moons that didn’t exist.
Worse, new kings and queens began appearing in the dreams of others. Not one, but dozens. Competing. Colliding. Some benevolent, others mad.
Nepheri had seeded them inside her nested dream. Plural monarchs born of recursive slumber.
Within two years, the entire waking empire folded in on itself. Cities became spirals. Languages turned palindromic. The Dream Enumerators disappeared, having dreamed themselves into forests.
And still, Nepheri dreamt.
Deep within the Draemhold, her face serene, her body unchanged.
Some say she is not asleep at all, but watching through the eyes of crows and puddles, curious what shape the chaos will take.
Others say this world, Revaal, is itself a fragment. One of many she dreamt before the dreaming began.
Still others insist that somewhere, in a cave beyond the mirage of waking, there is a child now dreaming Nepheri into existence.
And if you ever find them, you must not wake them.
The real always prefers to remain unfinished.