🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Meta-Meaning, Knowledge, Language | (36) MMK-003-E1
They say there were twelve tongues at the start of the shaping, each tuned to a different force: stone, root, sky, salt, smoke, hunger, blood, shadow, fire, storm, birth, and forgetting. The twelfth spoke only once, and the world bent like molten glass.
But there was always a thirteenth.
Not born. Not made.
Not granted, but slipped through.
The Thirteenth Tongue was never taught.
It arrived when the first listener mistook meaning for truth.
It slithered through that error, bloomed in the misstep, fed on the pause.
The Scribes of Mol turned their backs to the wind when they carved their grammar.
Even still, the wind changed the marks.
And children born near those tablets could not speak without reshaping the sky.
A shepherd once tried to name the star above his field, and the grass began to hum.
He left the field.
The hum followed.
When he died, the hum continued.
In the Archives of Orru, there is a sealed chamber of clay tablets.
No one has read them.
No one will.
For each reader’s mind births a new law from the same line.
The first law is always devotion.
The second is always ruin.
The Thirteenth Tongue speaks in the cracks of oaths.
It nests between synonyms.
It blooms only when meaning splits.
Those who understand it forget how to agree.
They speak, and the world listens in twelve ways at once.
The monks at the Bone Tower record what they can.
But the ink dries into shapes they did not write.
One monk tried to trace the word for truth.
By morning, his hand had drawn a door.
No one has opened it.
Some say the Tongue is a sickness.
Others say it is a key.
But the oldest song, the one no mouth has sung whole, says this:
That every language is a cage that once was a wing.
That the Thirteenth Tongue is not spoken, but awakened.
And that when it rises, the words we trusted will weep.
And walk.
And leave.
And something stranger will begin.