🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Society & Future | (20) SF-004-E1
They say she was born mouth-first. Before the midwife could lift her, she had already asked why, not in wailing, but in grammar.
No one answered. Her mother wept dryly. Her father left without shoes. The village owl refused to hoot for seven years.
She learned early the price of precision. Each question carved itself behind her teeth, bright and sharp as a syllable-shaped knife. The counting began. Her tongue was a dwindling candle.
At ten, she asked what the wind was hiding. At eleven, whether dreams were memory or prophecy. At twelve, she asked if snow remembered falling.
By sixteen she had used ninety.
She walked in circles that led nowhere and watched the sky for cracks.
The villagers grew afraid. They feared the sound of her voice. Not because it was cruel, but because it made their own thoughts feel counterfeit.
One day she climbed the tower that had been locked since the first flood. On the roof stood an iron bowl, dry as bone and twice as heavy.
She set her last ten questions in it like offerings:
Ninety-one: What lives between the seconds?
Ninety-two: Where do forgotten gods go?
Ninety-three: If I swallow the stars, will I see what they see?
Ninety-four: What did the first question ask?
Ninety-five: Who placed the limit?
Ninety-six: Do echoes get tired?
Ninety-seven: What color is silence before it’s broken?
Ninety-eight: Is there a shape to yearning?
Ninety-nine: What do questions eat when we sleep?
One hundred: If I ask nothing else, will the answers still come?
Then she opened her mouth. Nothing emerged.
She smiled.
The bowl caught fire without flame. The sky turned inside out. Stones forgot gravity. Birds sang songs in reverse.
Since that day, some children are born without voices, but they dream in questions. Some wells whisper riddles when no one watches. And the tower? It vanished that night, but people say they’ve seen it in other places, sideways in time, gathering rust.
And always, near the threshold of the hundredth question, a figure appears barefoot, eyes bright, lips closed.
Waiting.
Not for answers.
But for the next voice.