🌿 The Signpost That Points Nowhere — A Story of Reference 🌿

After the Glass-Heart Moth dissolved into silver night-dust, Liora walked on, guided only by the faint echo of her own wonder.

The forest changed as she moved: trees grew straighter, paths cleaner, and stones more deliberately arranged — as if someone had been tidying reality into sentences.

At last she reached a small clearing.

In its centre stood a signpost of polished white wood, elegant and tall, its surface carved with hundreds of arrows extending in all directions —

some straight, some curved, some looping back, some pointing into the earth, and some straight upward into nothing at all.

Curiously, none of the arrows bore labels.

Liora approached, touching one of the smooth arrowheads.

Immediately, a gentle voice spoke — not from the signpost, but from behind her thoughts:

“Are you lost, child?”

Liora turned.

Standing by the closest tree was a creature that seemed almost familiar and yet impossible to name.

It looked like a heron carved from parchment, covered in ancient writing that rearranged itself like ripples whenever it moved.

Where a beak should have been, it had a long quill, and where its eyes should be, two ink-dark pools shimmered like unwritten possibility.

Liora asked, “Do you know where these arrows lead?”

The parchment-heron tilted its quill-beak.

“They point nowhere.

Because nowhere is where you imagine a there to be.”

Liora frowned. “Then why have a signpost at all?”

The creature stepped closer, its wings unfolding into pages that fluttered without wind.

“Your people believe that meaning lies elsewhere —

in objects, in things, in hidden referents.

So you invent arrows to point beyond.

But words do not point.

They make the world appear in a certain shape.”

The signpost chimed softly as if agreeing.

Liora asked, “Then what does a sign mean?”

The parchment-heron’s ink-pools glimmered.

“A sign means what it makes possible.

Not what it points toward.”

It brushed its wing lightly against one of the blank arrows.

Instantly, the trees around the clearing rearranged themselves,

forming a shape that looked almost like the meaning of home —

not a building, not a place,

but a felt alignment.

Liora whispered, “So meaning isn’t in objects?”

The creature answered gently:

“Meaning is never out there.

Meaning is how you open the world into form.”

Then the signpost quivered, and one arrow slowly bent toward her —

not to indicate direction, but to acknowledge relation.

It no longer pointed away, but toward the space between them.

Liora felt warmth rise in her chest —

not understanding as possession,

but understanding as connection.

The parchment-heron dipped its quill like a bow.

“When you stop seeking the object behind the word,

the forest will no longer appear as distance,

but as conversation.”

And with that, the creature folded back into text,

then into whispering,

then into the quiet

from which meaning comes.