🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Body & Death | (21) BD-002-E
There is a story the surgeons used to tell before the forgetting was carved into law.
It was never written down, only stitched into the hems of ceremonial robes and spoken on the last breath of the fifth inhalation, when thought turned soft and edges bled. It went like this:
In the first city, before the architectures of self were mortared with mirrors, there was a loom that could not weave thread. It wove time.
Every night, two dreamers would be chosen. Their bodies left sleeping in the salt fields, kissed with ash. Their minds wound into the loom’s spiral, neither ascending nor descending but shifting leftward, gently, until their fibers touched.
By morning, they returned. Only one remembered.
And even that one could not say what was true.
Later, the loom was broken. Not destroyed, but bent until it forgot how to lie. They say it became a mirror, and the mirror a seed, and the seed a rule. That rule was folded into the spine of a child born without a shadow.
That child grew old in a week, laughing in seven languages at once.
When asked what it felt like to live in a stranger’s bones, they replied:
"It was like wearing a song backwards."
Then they coughed up a feather and walked into the river.
Elsewhere, a statue stands.
It bears no name, only the trace of many. Its face is half-mask, half-window. Inside, if the dusk is right and your hunger precise, you may glimpse the gesture of a thousand hands reaching not to take, but to remain.
Around the base of the statue are carvings, scratched by pilgrims and fools alike.
One reads:
I was you once.
Another:
I still am.
The deepest carving is too worn to read.
But if you press your palm to it, and close your eyes, and forget what it means to be only one…
you may feel it speak.
Not with words, but with the ache of unreturned footsteps.
You will not know whose feet they were.
You will only know they were yours.