They say she was born of starlight and regret, a consequence of a forgotten theorem. Engelberta wasn't a woman in the way mortals understand it. She was a resonance, a ripple in the fabric of awareness that manifested as a being of shifting geometries and melancholic light. Her purpose, as far as any record can determine, was to map the echoes - the faint resonances of moments that had shattered and dispersed across the timelines. Not moments of grand historical significance, but the quieter ones: a child's first laugh, a lover's unspoken goodbye, the precise instant a single grain of sand slipped through a hand.
Her maps weren’t drawn with ink and quill, but with strands of solidified silence. Each map was a miniature universe, a contained vortex of faded emotion. The colors weren't pigments, but the shades of sorrow and joy that clung to the lost events. Some maps pulsed with a sickly green, representing regret; others shimmered with a fragile, hopeful blue – the vestiges of unfulfilled dreams. The most dangerous maps were obsidian black, saturated with the raw, untamed energy of forgotten traumas.
“The past is not a place to visit, but a scent to remember. And I am the one who collects the scent.” – Engelberta’s Log, Fragment 74.
Engelberta’s dwelling was not a building, but a structure woven into the folds of reality itself. It existed within the Obsidian Labyrinth – a region of perpetually shifting spacetime located just beyond the veil of perception. Accessing it required a key forged from concentrated memory and a willingness to embrace the disorientation. The Labyrinth itself responded to her presence, its corridors twisting and reforming, guided by the echoes she sought to record.
Within the Labyrinth, she navigated using a device called the Chronometric Compass – a swirling sphere of polished obsidian that reacted to temporal distortions. The needle didn't point north, but towards the strongest resonance. The walls of the Labyrinth whispered with the fragmented voices of the past, occasionally coalescing into fleeting images – a warrior’s face, a peasant’s song, a lover's desperate plea.
Rumors spoke of a chamber at the heart of the Labyrinth, containing a single, perfect tear of Engelberta herself – a repository of all the lost echoes she had ever collected. To gaze upon it was to risk being consumed by the weight of forgotten sorrows, but also to gain an unprecedented understanding of the intricate tapestry of existence.
As time continued to flow, Engelberta began to fade. Not in a physical sense, but in her connection to the echoes. The timelines themselves were becoming increasingly fragmented, the echoes growing fainter, less defined. Her maps grew incomplete, their colors muted, their structures collapsing. Some believed her fading was a natural consequence of her purpose – that as the echoes disappeared, so too would she.
Before she vanished completely, Engelberta left behind a single, final map – a small, shimmering rectangle of pure white. It contained only one echo: the sound of silence. And the instruction, etched in the faintest of light, to listen.