Ciela shielded her eyes as the Story Star exploded in a shower of narrative particles, each one a fragment of an unheard childhood memory. The Narrative Galaxy's first constellation—shaped like a silver spindle—began to twist, its stars warping into tangled threads of unresolved pain.
"Stars are collapsing!" Nox shouted, his constellation-glasses crackling with erratic data. "The Story Star's birth triggered a Narrative Storm—every untold trauma in this galaxy is converging into a single... Memory-Eater Moth."
Kai clutched his head as his chlorophyll hair turned translucent, revealing the roots of his emotions tangled with the galaxy's collective trauma. "I hear them... millions of voices shouting, 'We were never heard!'"
Just then, a creature the size of a small moon emerged from the storm, its wings patterned with the faded symbols of forgotten languages. The Memory-Eater Moth flapped its wings, and a wave of amnesia energy washed over the nascent galaxy—story-flowers wilted, Listening Ferns turned to dust, and even Ciela's silver spindle dimmed.
"它在吞噬叙事!" Azura yelled, her blue hair erupting into 荆棘火 that sputtered out upon contact with the moth's scales. "Our stories are its food!"
Xander raised his shadow-patch-covered arms, summoning a tapestry of his own healed traumas. "Trauma needs to be seen, not eaten!" But the tapestry dissolved as the moth's antennae brushed it, turning his memories into blank fabric.
Ciela stumbled, her rainbow hair losing color. The silver spindle's 叙事伤疤 began to throb, revealing a hidden inscription: "In the void of unspoken pain, even healing becomes a lie."
"The First Keeper's shadow self was right," she gasped. "This moth isn't just eating stories—it's feeding on the shame of not telling them."
Lyra tapped her staff, now a barren branch, and a single Story Flower bloomed—its petals were the words of her own long-repressed fear of abandonment. "Shame is the silence that lets trauma fester."
Kai's hair suddenly glowed with a new frequency, photosynthesizing the moth's amnesia energy into tiny "Voice Crystals." "I think... I can give the unheard stories a new form."
Ciela seized the idea, weaving the Voice Crystals into a net with her silver spindle. "We need to catch the moth, not fight it."
As the net touched the moth's wings, the creature shuddered, its scales transforming into transparent panels that displayed the forgotten stories: a child's first lie, a parent's unspoken apology, a civilization's buried guilt.
"Look!" Nox pointed to the moth's core—a glowing seed identical to the one they'd found in the Narrative Void. "It's not a destroyer; it's a cocoon for unheard stories."
Ciela gently touched the seed, and the moth's body dissolved into a swarm of Story Butterflies, each carrying a healed trauma. The seed sprouted into a "Narrative Tree," its roots deep in the galaxy's center, its branches spreading across the stars.
But as the storm cleared, Ciela noticed a single scale from the Memory-Eater Moth had lodged in her silver spindle, inscribed with the words: "Beware the weaver who believes all stories must be told."
In the distance, the spiral-horned alien from before stood beneath the Narrative Tree, his hands raised to catch a falling Story Butterfly. But as he did, his shadow lengthened, revealing a hidden mark—the same hourglass symbol of the Story Reapers.
Kai shivered, his hair wilting slightly. "I think... he's not here to hear stories. He's here to..."
"To harvest them," Xander finished, sewing a new shadow-patch onto his sleeve—this one shaped like an hourglass.
Ciela held up the silver spindle, its 叙事伤疤 now glowing with a warning. The Narrative Galaxy had been born, but the battle between telling and silencing was far from over. And in the depths of the new Narrative Tree, a root began to glow with the first words of a story that even the Memory-Eater Moth had feared: "Once upon a time, there was a weaver who learned that some stories are better left... in the silence between the threads."