🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Time & Reality | (7) TR-002-F1
There was a village at the rim of the salt flats where clocks were grown from rootless trees.
Each child was given a clockling at birth, planted in a bowl of ash and breath, and taught to prune it carefully. The clocklings were not mechanical, nor were they made of wood, exactly. They grew in loops, their branches ticking in arcs, leaves folding and unfolding with each passing second.
When Imra turned thirteen, her clockling flowered for the first time. This was rare. Most flowered only once, just before their owner died. The bloom emerged without warning: a pale blue sphere the size of a thumbprint, hovering just above the gnarled crown.
The village elders gathered in a hushless circle and stared at it.
“This means she will step outside,” one of them said. “Only the outwalkers bloom early.”
Imra did not ask what it meant. She simply bowed and took her clockling into the Flats as the petals began to pulse.
She knew how the world would stop.
They called it the Still. It came once a year. No bells rang, no light changed, but every soul outside the gift would freeze: mid-step, mid-word, mid-thought. For one minute, the gifted would walk alone.
The Still arrived that day with no sound, no chill. The clouds held their breath. Birds hung on invisible strings in the air. The salt beneath her cracked like burnt paper.
Imra stepped forward.
Her footsteps left no echo. The horizon had collapsed into something smaller, more curved, as though she walked within a snow globe turned inside out.
At the fourth mile marker, she saw a child paused in the middle of a scream, their face twisted toward a bird that had not yet fallen. At the eighth, a man was caught mid-kneel, proposing to a woman whose eyes had begun to blur. Their edges flickered, unstable.
Each year the world degraded more during the Still.
Imra approached the Gnomon, the spindle at the center of the Flats. A ten-story column of smooth, silver-bone material that no one had ever touched. It had no origin, no inscription. But it had always stood at the axis where time collapsed.
She placed her flowered clockling in the basin at its base.
The bloom opened.
A cascade of seconds spilled out. Real seconds. The ones she had stored. For every Still she had walked, a thread of her own time had knotted beneath her ribs. And now, she unspooled them.
From the threads rose others.
People she did not know. People she may have been. A version of her with sand-colored hair. A version of her with tears that burned as they fell. A version of her missing both arms, who smiled with her teeth pressed tight.
They each reached for the Gnomon with gestures only they understood.
It did not respond.
Imra closed her eyes. She whispered something she had never spoken aloud. Not a plea. A memory.
The bloom dimmed.
The others faded.
And still the Gnomon remained.
Imra picked up her clockling. Its branches had stilled. No ticking now. No looping leaves.
She turned from the basin and began the long walk back.
In the distance, time began to stir. A bird resumed its descent. A scream cracked the air. A proposal continued.
No one would know what she had offered.
But when Imra returned to the village, she placed her stillborn clockling at the foot of the Rootless Tree, the source of all loops, and walked into the Flats again.
This time, when the bloom returned, it was not hers alone.
The others had bloomed too.
And somewhere, deep beneath the salt, a second Gnomon opened its eyes.