They say that long after the last tale of the Thousand and One Nights was told—after Scheherazade had laid her head upon the king’s heart and the sword was put away—the moon grew restless.

And so the moon summoned her own storyteller: an old woman with eyes like shadowed water and a voice made of silk and salt.

The moon asked, “Tell me a story I do not already know.”

And the woman began.

Once, in a land where the wind wrote verses into the sand and the stars bowed low to kiss the domes of mosques, there lived a woman known only by her silence.

They called her the Woman Who Gathers Stones.

She had no name, no home, and no price. Only her Sight.

She wandered from oasis to oasis, town to town. She never stayed, never explained her purpose, and yet always arrived just before something shifted beneath the surface of things.

She was not a prophet. She did not foretell wars or fortunes or deaths. She simply saw.

She saw what others could not—what curled quietly in the future like a sleeping cat. But she was bound to silence. To speak of what she saw would disturb the balance. And so she said nothing.

But her hands remembered what her mouth could not say. And they knew how to leave a warning.

Wherever she went, she left behind a single stone. Always smooth. Always marked.

No one could read the symbols. Yet those who found the stones often felt something stir within: a strange clarity, a dream half-remembered, a sense of being watched gently but from very far away.

Some stones bore the shape of an eye.

Some, a spiral unraveling.

Some, a tear falling into a well.

One spring, she came to a city of terraced gardens carved into the cliffs, where a young ruler sat beneath a fig tree and dreamed uneasy dreams.

He was to choose a companion.

Suitors came—some with golden speech, others with the fragrance of cedar and smoke. But one came veiled in white. Not the white of snow or pearls, but the white of salt: the kind that gathers at the edge of forgotten water.

She spoke little, but her presence was serene. Her voice was cool, her movements measured. She was precise without sharpness, and the ruler felt calmed by her—almost erased.

He thought, this is peace.

But the Seer, the Woman Who Gathers Stones, was watching.

What she saw was not evil. Not a trap. Not cruelty.

Only this: a long hallway with no doors. A lamp slowly dimming, though never quite extinguished. A song left unsung—not silenced, just misplaced.

She saw a man who would become quieter than he meant to. She saw the stillness that hides a slow forgetting. Not a crime. But a withering.

And so she left what she always left.

At the base of the fig tree, she placed a smooth stone.

This one was marked with an eye beneath a crescent, and beside it, a spiral unraveling into sand.

Then she walked away, as shadows do when the candle is lit.

The ruler never saw her go. He chose the white-veiled woman. His palace grew quieter. The music fell silent. The mirrors dulled. The fig tree bloomed, but no longer bore fruit.

Years later, he walked alone through the old garden and came to the tree.

At its base, he found the stone.

He did not understand the markings. But he pressed it to his lips and wept.

The old woman fell silent. The moon, grown gentler, asked her, “Was the Seer cursed?”

She smiled—not with her lips, but in the way her silence softened.

“No,” she said.

“Only by the burden of seeing what cannot be spoken, and loving what cannot be held.”

It is whispered, though never confirmed, that if the Seer ever had a companion, he lived in quiet terror.

Not from betrayal, nor wrath. But because he could never lie to her.

No secret bite of pomegranate, no disguised sigh, no harmless story told with a crooked smile could pass unnoticed.

She once tilted her head slightly, and her beloved confessed not only that he had spoken to the spice-seller when he said he hadn’t—but what the merchant had been humming and how many eyelashes had fallen from his own lid during the lie.

And still—she was worth it.

Or so they say.