The lie, once spoken, hung in the silent space between the two beings, an invisible but palpable thing. The being of quiet joy, the recipient of the falsehood, at first felt only relief. Its neighbor was happy. The world, though fractured, was not entirely broken. But a seed of doubt had been planted, a tiny, insistent question that it could not at first articulate.
The being of sunsets, the liar, felt a different kind of turmoil. It had built a wall of words to hide its fear, but the wall was a prison. It was now forced to maintain the fiction, to project a sense of joy it did not feel. The effort was a constant strain, a low-level hum of anxiety beneath the surface of its constructed reality. And in its anxiety, its projections became just a little too bright, its joy just a little too loud.
The being of quiet joy, which had known the being of sunsets with a perfect intimacy for its entire existence, sensed the discordance. It was a subtle thing, a note that was just slightly off-key. The projected joy did not feel like the real joy it remembered. It was a hollow echo, a performance. And for the first time, it looked at its neighbor not with empathy, but with suspicion.
It asked another question, a simple one, but now freighted with a new and terrible weight. “You. To-be-with. True. Joy?”
The addition of the new word, “True,” was a challenge, a demand for verification. The being of sunsets was trapped. To answer truthfully would be to admit the lie. To lie again would be to deepen the deception, to build the wall higher. The age of simple communication was over. The age of interpretation, of subtext, of the agonizing space between what is said and what is meant, had begun. The first lie had given birth to the first suspicion, and with it, the simple, beautiful world of the Woven World was well and truly gone. In its place was a world of masks, of questions, of the endless, and endlessly fascinating, problem of the other.