Brammelwurz, the Collector of Time Spores

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Deep in the Misty Moor, where no map is valid and even sounds begin to whisper, lived Brammelroot. In a gnarled house of intertwined roots, entwined with moss and crisscrossed by glowing veins of spores, he spent his days doing a job few understood—and even fewer dared: He was a collector. Not a hunter of things, not a hoarder of brilliance. Brammelwurz collected what had almost happened. Time spores, the old chronicles said, arise only in moments of extreme possibility—when a decision lingers on the brink of being made. An unspoken word. An aborted step. A glance almost returned. From precisely such "almosts" grew tiny glowing spores, barely visible, as fleeting as the last breath of a dream. But Brammelwurz had a feeling for them—a hearing behind the hearing, a seeing in the not-yet-seen.With a magnifying glass made of ice lens, nets of shimmer silk, and containers of memory amber, he roamed the moor daily. He knew the paths that were never finished. He knew the shimmer left behind by a decision almost made. And he knew the patience it took to capture it all. His workshop was filled with shelves of softly glowing glass spheres—each containing a spore, each a story that almost happened. One gray morning, as the wind crept old and sad through the root window, Brammelwurz spotted a spore that behaved differently. It didn't flicker. It sang. Very quietly. A hum, as if from a place never reached. He picked it up—carefully, with two spoons of breath gold—and laid it in a nest of dry whispering grass. For three days, it said nothing. Then, on the fourth night, it began to glow. Not brightly. Not garishly. But deeply. At its core, an image flickered: Brammelwurz himself, at a crossroads that no longer existed. He stood still. Behind him: his life. In front of him: something unknown. And though he had never actually been there, he knew that moment. "You are the decision I never made," he whispered. The next morning, he sealed the spore with a tiny rune and wrote in his book: Spore No. 173: Movement without movement. Light from indecision. Preserved. In the weeks that followed, Brammelwurz began a new collection: not just of the almost-happened, but also of the almost-thought. He built a new wall of shelves in his workshop—of petrified memory roots and sparkling shattered glass. Inside, he placed jars of spores grown not just from action, but from hope. One spore bore the whiff of a never-spoken resolution. Another shimmered the color of a smile that was never born. He began to speak softly to them. And sometimes—very rarely—they responded. Not with words, but with changes in the light, with tiny fluctuations in the rhythm of their glow. He noted everything. For him, recording wasn't a compulsion, but a listening with his pen. Every line on the parchment was an attempt to give place to an almost lost moment. At night, when the moor was shrouded in silvery mist and time itself breathed more slowly,