The first wall did not remain the only wall for long. The idea, once manifested, was a spark in a dry forest. The being of quiet joy, huddled behind its hastily constructed barrier of self, became an object of intense and fearful curiosity. The other beings of the Woven World, who had never encountered a boundary they could not cross, pressed against this new, invisible thing. They felt its psychic resistance, the cold and smooth finality of a consciousness turned inward, and it terrified them more than the silence of the Echo.
The terror was a contagion. A being made of shared laughter felt the pressure from its neighbors, their fear a suffocating weight. It saw the accusation in their projections: What are you hiding? Why won’t you share? And in its panic, it, too, built a wall. Then another, and another. The act of wall-building spread through the Woven World like a shockwave, a frantic, desperate scramble for the imagined safety of solitude. Each new wall was a slammed door, a shout of “I,” where before there had only been the gentle hum of “we.”
The Woven World, once a seamless tapestry of shared feeling, was now a fractured mosaic of isolated minds. The threads of connection, once their greatest strength, were now tethers to a shared panic. The beings who had only ever known the warmth of total empathy were now shivering in the cold of their own sovereignty. They had wanted to escape the fear of the other, but in doing so, they had created a thousand new fears. They were afraid of their neighbors, afraid of the silence, and most of all, afraid of the vast, unexplored territory that was their own, individual self. The Unraveling was nearly complete. The age of perfect unity was over. The age of the self had begun.