🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Body & Death | (21) BD-002-F2
Once each cycle, when the sun moved behind the shard-star and the air smelled of burnt honey, the people of Clevara held the Glass Feast.
They arrived in cloaks of clinking chimes, each bearing a name not their own. The Square of Mirrors filled with dancers who did not speak. A stranger’s body was the price of entry. You could not enter as yourself.
No one knew who had begun the tradition, nor how the switching was done. It came in dreams, or with the taste of silver on the tongue. A merchant might wake as a herdsman. A child as an elder. A widow as a bride. The only rule was silence. To speak of it broke the spell and brought the red smoke.
Yrene was twelve the first time she entered. She awoke in limbs that towered, with hair like inked thread and knuckles calloused from wind and tool. She wandered the feast in awe, touching fruits that bled music and glass birds that wept into bowls. In a voice she didn’t know, she sang into the choral wells and felt her ribs ring like bells.
She never found the body she’d left. That was part of it too.
Each year, the body returned, but memory never followed.
Each year, a part of her stayed behind.
By her twentieth feast, Yrene had danced in the frame of nine strangers. Once, she bore the aches of childbirth in hips not hers. Another year, she spun for hours on prosthetic feet, metal legs drumming the plaza like ancestral thunder.
No one kept records. There were no lists. But if you looked closely, some bore tattoos they didn’t remember earning. Others developed strange tastes or reflexes they could not place. A child who had never whistled might whistle in sleep. A guard might suddenly grieve a mother he never knew.
On the thirtieth feast, Yrene did not wake in another.
She woke inside her own skin.
But something had shifted. Her limbs remembered lives she had not lived. Her eyes lingered on people she did not know. When she passed a mirror, she saw not herself, but a flickering. A crowd pressed behind the glass.
At the feast that year, she wore no cloak. She entered the Square barefoot and open. No one stopped her.
She danced.
And as she danced, others stopped.
One by one, bodies around her stilled. The music grew fainter. The mirror at the center of the square, which had stood faceless for all memory, began to ripple.
From its surface, hands emerged.
One pair. Then four. Then dozens.
They were not threatening. They were remembering.
Yrene stepped forward.
Not knowing whether she would be taken, or returned, or undone.
Only knowing she could no longer hold what she carried.
When she reached the mirror, her reflection opened its mouth.
It spoke not with sound, but with light.
And the word it formed was her own.
But it was shaped by every voice that had worn her bones.
When she turned around, the Square was empty.
But in her chest, they remained.
Not as ghosts.
As guests.