🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Time & Reality | (31) TR-006-D2
She did not speak. Not at birth, not at six seasons, not beneath the bloom-laden branches of the old tree where the village children traced spirals in the dust. The silence wrapped her like a second skin, softer than cloth and deeper than any hush the village could remember.
They named her Lira, though the name was a borrowed thing. Names, in that place, had long since lost their lineage. No one knew their grandparents’ faces. Portraits faded themselves. Records rewrote dates each time someone tried to read them.
Only the tree remained constant. And Lira.
She slept in the attic of the bellkeeper’s house, where clocks swayed on strings instead of ticking on walls. There, time blurred itself into vapor, and each night, Lira crossed into gardens she had never walked. She saw footprints embedded in moss she had never touched. And once, a boy with palms pressed together, standing beneath the plum tree, his eyes full of the kind of knowing that feels like rain before it falls.
The elders said she wandered too much, even in sleep. They placed salt around her bed and bellglass beneath her pillow. Still, the dreams returned.
Each night she walked barefoot through memory.
The gardens changed. Sometimes they filled with violet smoke, sometimes they froze in amber light. Once she passed a woman with no face who hummed to stones. Another time, she saw a tree whose bark peeled back like parchment, each strip etched with names that whispered when the wind stirred.
She did not fear these places. They were more familiar than the waking village, more tender than the warnings of the adults who spoke to her with gentle eyes and frightened hands.
But it was the boy who stayed with her. Always beneath the plum tree. Always silent. His presence a stillness that echoed through her bones. He looked younger than the others she encountered in her night-walks. Or perhaps older. It was hard to say, in a place where memory ripened and rotted in the same breath.
One night, Lira reached toward him.
She did not speak. She never had. But she offered her hand.
He smiled without moving.
The dream dissolved.
She woke with her hands wrapped in moss. Fresh. Dew-damp. Trembling at the edges with tiny threads of gold.
The bellkeeper wept when he saw her fingers. Not for sorrow. Not for fear. But for something ancient in his body that remembered soil. He kissed her forehead and said nothing more.
The next night, the garden bloomed in reverse. The petals fell upward. Stones turned to saplings. A wind unspooled the sky.
And in its center, the tree.
Not the one from her world. Not even the one from the boy’s.
This tree pulsed.
Its trunk was a braid of timelines. Its blossoms spoke in silence. Its fruit was not for eating, but for remembering.
Lira stood at its base.
The boy was gone.
In his place, a small mirror hung from a branch. Within it, her own eyes blinked back. They were older, filled with soil and sky.
She placed the moss in a hollow at the tree’s base. The earth sighed.
The village stirred that night with dreams it could not name. People wept without knowing why. A toddler said the name of his great-grandmother. A woman painted the face of her father, though she had never seen a picture. Even the clocks paused. Just for a breath. Just long enough to remember they once had purpose.
Lira slept on, hands clean, breath slow, heart tethered now not just to dream, but to the thread of all that had ever lived and asked to be remembered.