🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Time & Reality | (31) TR-006-E1
They kept no records. Only petals.
Each name, once spoken into the roots, became a blossom. They grew from soil salted with longing, their scent changing with the dreamer who dared to touch them. Some crumbled on contact. Others pulsed with light. One sang.
Beneath the plum tree, time coiled inwards. The monks of the Withheld Hour came only once, barefoot and blindfolded. They moved in silence and carried no ink. Instead, they pressed their lips to the bark, and in return, the tree showed them lives they never lived. Upon return, they would not speak. They would paint in circles, hum in spirals, and vanish within the decade.
It is said there was a child who bore a petal in her palm for seven years. It did not fade. Each night she opened her hand and heard a story not her own: a man kneeling before a closed window, a woman forgetting her daughter's voice mid-song, a feast never served. When the child finally buried the petal, a branch split skyward and rained plumlight for three days. Villagers wore it as pigment, and the paintings still blink.
One fragment, retrieved from the Ashwood well, reads:
If you arrive to remember, do not ask who you were.
If the tree reveals your shadow, bow twice.
If your tongue burns with a name you never learned, swallow it.
This is how forgetting guards the gate.
There are drawings in the margins: a hand touching a root that becomes an eye. A ladder woven from moth wings. A house that breathes.
The archivists have yet to decipher the final page. It contains no ink. Only the faint imprint of a petal, and beneath it, four words:
She saw him first.