🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Society & Future | (8) SF-002-F2
They gathered each night beneath the obsidian fruit tree, their skin dusted with pollen that shimmered like unspoken thoughts. Nine of them, always nine, though no one had ever counted aloud. To speak here meant to say only what was true. And what was true had become unbearably small.
The Tenth Mouth arrived when the moons aligned in the shape of a question.
They did not walk. They emerged. As if a fold in the world turned outward and there they were, wearing robes stitched from molted dawns, carrying a flute carved from a bone no one could name.
The flute had no holes.
“Who are you?” asked the eldest of the nine, whose tongue knew only the angles of accuracy.
The Tenth smiled. “I am the Mouth that sings what isn’t.”
The nine trembled. Such a phrase should have collapsed into ash. Words that did not correspond to the World could not remain standing. But this one did. And worse: it echoed.
The Tenth sat among them and laid out an impossible map. On it were places with names like Between, Once, and Soonish. No coordinates. Only questions. Only curves.
They spoke of a field where flowers bloomed in apology. Of a stairwell that descended into dreams someone else had. Of a child born fluent in riddles, who vanished the moment she said “maybe.”
The eldest tried to interrupt. “That cannot be.”
The Tenth replied, “It already isn’t.”
Then they played the flute. No sound came. But every insect within reach began to dance in unfamiliar patterns. Trees leaned sideways, listening. The wind developed a stutter.
That night, the nine dreamt for the first time in years. And in those dreams were things with colors that did not exist, rules that hummed, languages that asked questions without answers.
They awoke hollowed and vast.
On the seventh night, the Tenth said, “I will teach you to speak the tenth truth.”
“There are only nine,” said the youngest.
“There were,” said the Tenth.
The lesson did not involve grammar. It involved forgetting how to anchor. Letting go of point and shape. Believing in echoes that came before the sound.
One by one, they tried. Their mouths opened, and only exactness came. Until the third among them, a potter named Linel, laughed.
No one had laughed since the Forgetting.
It broke something. Or mended it. The flute cracked, and from it poured a river of painted air.
They followed it.
The tenth truth cannot be written. But those who learned it became more than mouths. They became stories with legs.
They walked the world, speaking what might be.
And the world, tired of precision, began to listen.