🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Death & Beyond (Afterlife) | (27) DB-003-F1
Once a year, precisely at the moment of his birth, Ferris Quill vanished.
It happened whether he was alone or among company, whether asleep or mid-sentence. One breath, and then he was gone. Five minutes later, he returned. Sometimes with a subtle glow to his skin. Sometimes with blood under his fingernails. Once with a song stitched into the lining of his coat that no tailor could remove.
Ferris never spoke of where he went. Nor did he know, in the usual sense. His return always came with the taste of iron and the sense that he had made a promise he couldn’t remember.
By the age of twelve, the elders of Merinvale declared him a “Tither.”
“There are others,” the Bone Reader said, sorting her deck of glass leaves. “But not many. Some go mad. Some never return. You’ve kept your shape. That is rare.”
Ferris didn't want to be rare. He wanted a life shaped like the others: years unbroken, footsteps without gaps. But the visits carved through him. They were uninvited rituals, and he bore them like tattoos he could not see.
On the eve of his nineteenth disappearance, Ferris met a woman whose dog could see the seams in time. The dog barked only at mirrors and scratched at sundials.
“You ripple,” she said to Ferris, sipping cider beneath a clockless tree. “Like a blade half-drawn.”
“I don't know where I go,” he admitted. “I only know that when I return, something is missing. Or added.”
She smiled without affection. “You’ve been taking too much. The veil is not a window. It's a debt.”
That night, Ferris dreamt of a meadow that hung beneath the world, suspended on threads of burnt hair. He walked among giant mushrooms that rang when he stepped too close. In the center was a scale made of bone and wind. One side held a feather. The other, his name.
He awoke gasping. His fingernails were filled with blue ash.
Twenty-three came, and with it, his body vanished again. This time, he returned with a mark on his palm: a spiral drawn in moving ink, alive like fish under skin.
He tried to sever it. He poured salt over it. Still it pulsed.
He began carving a journal not with words, but with stains. Each year, a different pigment. Plum resin. Beetle oil. Rust.
By twenty-eight, he no longer slept the week before his birthday. He sat by the hearth and whispered promises to the fire.
“I’ll bring it back,” he said.
But what it was had become abstract. A sensation. A tension in the throat. A music only cats could hear.
On the eve of thirty-one, he entered the woods that the wind forgot. There, trees grew rings in reverse. Time walked backward, watching itself over its shoulder.
In the center stood a child with no shadow.
“You owe us,” said the child.
Ferris knelt. “I never asked to go.”
“You did,” said the child. “Before you had a name. You tithed in curiosity.”
The child handed him a coin that held no face, no metal, no weight. And still it pulled him forward.
“Spend it wisely,” the child said. “It is the last moment you will return.”
Ferris held the coin to his forehead. His body blurred like breath on glass.
In the years that followed, his journal became a pilgrimage site. Scholars argued over the pigments, the stains, the rhythm of the unspoken. Some claimed it was scripture. Others, a curse.
No one agreed on who Ferris was.
But once a year, always at the same moment, a wind would pass through Merinvale. Clocks would hum. Cats would yowl.
And somewhere, just outside the reach of name or death, a tithe was offered again.