🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Body & Death | (33) BD-003-E1
Before sound fractured, it was a god.
Not a god of speech or thunder or wind. A god that sang color into clay, that named stone not by word, but by hue. That wove animals not from flesh, but from vibration. They called this god Lural, though no two glyphs for Lural were ever the same.
In those days, children were taught to listen with their skin. The inner elbow. The temple. The soft roof of the mouth. Each tribe had its own tone-vault, sealed in a vessel grown from the bones of extinct birds. At birth, a child was placed beside it. If the vessel did not open, the child was raised among the voiceless. If it did, they were inked with the sound that bloomed.
One child was born with no vessel at all. No tribe claimed them. Their hands were pale, veined with a pigmentless echo. They did not cry, but when they opened their mouth, sunlight flickered. Only the elders of the forgotten pitches recognized what it meant: the return of Lural in fragmented form. Not as a god, but as a hinge.
The child grew. Wherever they stepped, color unraveled. Fruit turned transparent. Rivers hummed in octaves unseen. Those who listened too closely began to taste meaning on their teeth.
On the eve of the Audition of Meaning, this child stood barefoot beneath the Listening Bowl. The elders called for their sound. The child made none. Instead, they opened their mouth and absence leapt.
It was not silence. It was uncolor. Unchord. Unhistory.
Some say the child collapsed the Bowl inward, folding it into a polyphonic seed. Others say the elders vanished, each absorbed into a spectrum yet unnamed. A third account claims the entire valley became a chord too vast to be heard, and now lives in the bones of whales who sing beneath the crust of the earth.
A final fragment, scrawled in ochre on the underside of a cracked amphora, reads:
Lural was never a god.
Lural was a doorway mispronounced.
You do not enter through it.
You listen until it opens.
And when it does, you must choose
Which sense to leave behind.