🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Death & Beyond (Afterlife) | (9) DB-001-E
It is said that before the Sky was named, before Time began offering itself in hours, the Weaver-of-Ending spun nine masks from the marrow of the First Dreamer.
Each mask held a death.
Each death held a truth.
But only the final mask could be remembered.
They brought the masks to the Hill of Versions, where the winds argued and the roots listened. One by one, the Dreamer placed the masks upon their face and lived entire lifetimes beneath each. As a god. As a thief. As a trembling child beneath a tree of glass. Some lives ended in fire, others in forgetting. One ended while laughing in a garden that never grew again.
The ninth mask was not worn.
The ninth was buried.
Not in soil, but in the throat of the Dreamer themself.
There it waited, silent but knowing.
Long after the Dreamer had become myth, seekers came. They brought relics and riddles, teeth and offerings. None found the ninth mask, though some claimed to wear it. Their faces grew strange, their names frayed.
One, it is said, leapt into a river that flowed into the sky.
Another woke each morning with a different name on their tongue.
Another burned a library that existed only in their dreams.
The Weaver-of-Ending never returned.
But sometimes, at the edge of a mirror, just as light bends into untruth, a face flickers. Not your face, not quite. And you remember a laughter that left ashes in its wake.
This is how the ninth mask chooses.
It is not placed.
It is remembered backward.
And once chosen, all other deaths become fiction.
All other lives become masks on the floor of a forgotten room.
The Weaver waits there still. Not to greet, but to witness.
Not to reveal, but to ask:
Which death are you keeping?
And who did you become to carry it?