Brammelwurz and the Shadow Compass of Eolwyn

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It was a day such as only the ancient Timespores themselves had known: silent, shimmering, full of questions they didn't dare ask. Brammelwurz was sitting in the shade of his worktree with a cup of steaming spruce spurs when a barely perceptible click escaped the air—metallic, alien, rhythmic like a fleeting pulse. He paused. This sound wasn't from here. For gnomes like Brammelwurz, curiosity isn't just a profession, it's a calling. He left the cup, stuffed his shoulder bag with glass vials, spore paper, and the emergency moss ball, threw on his mushroom felt hat, and set off. The click came from the depths of the Old Moor. A place where maps offered only hints and even compasses twitched in confusion. Soon he noticed the shadow. Not the one cast by the sun—this one was independent. Round, shimmering, almost groping, it crawled across the ground leaves as if searching. Brammelwurz followed it. It crossed a thicket of whisper boxes, brushed against a petrified clockwork nest, and descended into the misty branches of Moorland. And there, among ancient tree stumps and time-clotted dew, he found it: the Shadow Compass of Eolwyn. The relic was smaller than he had expected. A disc-shaped artifact made of goldwurz, at the center of which sat an obsidian eye that pulsed gently. No pointer. No north. Only movement. The compass showed paths not taken. Decisions almost made—but not. Possibilities like spores, suspended in the subjunctive. No sooner had he touched the device than it began to tremble. And with it, the world. The forest around him flickered. With every step, he plunged into a scene that had never happened. He saw himself in a city of shadow sand, a chronicler extracting stories from tree bark. Then in a dome of water vapor, a collector of soundless sounds. Finally, the lonely guardian of a spore archive, where each spore contained an unspoken truth. The compass led him further, to a valley that lay like a silence. Ashen snow trickled from above. And there stood a tree of clear crystal, its branches bearing frozen memories. In the middle of it hung an empty spore capsule. Brammelwurz recognized it. A chronosilence—a spore that only grows when something could have been, but wasn't allowed to be. He reached out. And the moment his fingers touched the capsule, he heard them: voices. Whispering paths. Ways that waited. Had you done this... you would have been there... perhaps then... perhaps never... But then everything fell silent. The shadow compass fell still. Brammelwurz took a deep breath. "Perhaps it's good that some paths remain untrodden," he murmured. He stepped back, letting the spur hang as it was. And as he made his way home, his shadow felt brighter. Lighter. Freer. As if he had cast off a weight that was never really there—and yet was carried.