🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Time & Reality | (7) TR-002-E
They say a bell rings beneath the minutes.
Not the ones you count, but the ones you step around. The ones that hum like bone-glass when no one is moving. It is heard only once each year, just before forgetting begins.
The bell belongs to the Time-Eater.
No one knows its face. It does not have one. It wears yours, the moment before you lie. It wears your mother’s, when she said she'd be right back.
The Time-Eater does not devour hours or days. It eats the edge. The moment before the fall, the pause before the kiss, the breath before the scream. That is its feast. The almost.
Long ago, before the calendar learned to speak, the world was one continuous motion. But the boy stole a moment and kept it. The bell rang hollow that year. The Time-Eater came to him in a field of frozen birds. It opened its mouth and showed him his own face inside, asleep.
The boy dropped the moment. But it was too late. The wheel had cracked. Now the Minute returns each year, limping.
Some say the bell rings in churches that never existed. Some say it hides in the static between stations. Some say it rings once, deep in your skull, the second before you remember a thing you were never meant to know.
There is an old game played in the frozen cities of dream-children. You stand in a circle and shout the name of the Time-Eater. Whoever moves during the Minute disappears. Whoever stays still hears the bell in full. They come back with frost in their eyes, their hair grown one year longer, their teeth unfamiliar.
This is why no clocks are allowed in the dream-cities.
In the Fifth Archive, a page was found that reads:
“The Minute is not time paused. It is time held open, like a wound that will not close. Beware the ones who walk it. They are mirrors with footprints.”
At the bottom of that page, in different ink, is a child’s scrawl:
I met the bell. It rang inside me.
It is unclear if the child ever existed.
But the footprint remains.
Still glowing.
Still warm.
Still impossible.