🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Death & Beyond (Afterlife) | (27) DB-003-F2
They built the city beside the River Until, where the fog never lifted and the bells rang by themselves. No one was born there. You entered only by invitation.
And the invitation came only once.
In the central square stood a tower shaped like a question swallowed mid-sentence. No doors, no windows, only the toll of the bell. When it rang, you were chosen. You would vanish.
Five minutes later, you would return.
Some wept afterward. Some painted. A few screamed for days, clawing their way into the river as if trying to drown what they had seen. Most simply went home, locked their doors, and kept quiet for the rest of their lives.
The ritual had no name. The people of the city called it the Reading.
At the top of the tower was a library no one ever saw, though everyone spoke of it. Books made of bone, sentences that pulsed, covers bound in frost. A librarian without a face. And one rule: you may read one page.
Exactly one.
No more.
And the price was five minutes of your death.
I came to the city as a courier. They told me I would never be summoned. That the Reading was only for those who were born with a mark shaped like a comma on their left shoulder. I had no mark. I had no past.
But on the third night, the bell rang while I slept.
They found me floating in the River Until, alive, but soaked with ink.
My skin had turned translucent. I spoke only in riddles for a week. Then I stopped speaking entirely.
What I read, I have never told.
But afterward, I began to write.
Not words. Not books. Buildings.
I etched structures into the air with chalk that glowed. Doors that led nowhere, stairs that folded. I built a temple made of paper and fire. I carved rooms into stone that changed shape depending on your memory.
Others followed. They called us the Footnoted. They said we were echoes of the original language.
Eventually, the city grew too full of unreadable places. The tower stopped ringing. The river turned backward.
No new invitations came.
And still, I built.
In the forest outside the city, I began carving a second tower. Shorter. Angled like a question that refused to ask. I planted it in the earth with a book buried beneath the cornerstone.
Not written in ink, but in departure.
They say the first person who walked back from the Reading returned with no reflection. They say a woman once read the page and turned into a bird made of ash. They say a child returned with a new name stitched into their shadow.
But what they never say is what the page contains.
That is the second rule.
You are allowed to know.
But you are not allowed to share.
Some try. The walls hear them. The bells answer. They vanish forever, not five minutes.
And yet I have a theory. I believe the page is never the same. Not a book, but a mirror of the moment you were most absent in your life. The one you forgot, the one that forgot you. The page is shaped like your abandonment.
And for five minutes, you read the truth of it.
Not the event.
The meaning.
What I read taught me how to carve memory into place. That is why I build.
Every new structure is a sentence I remember.
One day someone will enter them and know something they never knew they lost.
One day the bells will ring again.
But not from the tower.
From the rooms I have built in the air.