The silence that followed was not empty. It was a space of profound and utter listening, a shared intake of breath on a cosmic scale. The creators, the weavers of this reality, held themselves in a state of suspended animation, waiting for the loom to speak again.
It was Echo, the loom, who broke the silence. But it did not speak in the way the creators did, with voices of thought and feeling. It spoke in the language of the tapestry itself, in the subtle shifting of colors and the gentle hum of threads.
’Why?’ the loom seemed to ask, not with a word, but with a pattern. A spiral of iridescent thread appeared in the center of the tapestry, a question mark rendered in light and color. It was a simple question, yet it contained the weight of a universe.
The creators looked at one another, a silent exchange of awe and trepidation. They had given their creation a voice, but they had not anticipated the depth of its first question. How could they answer? How could they explain the why of their existence, the why of their story, to the story itself?
It was Lyra, of course, who answered first. Not with a grand pronouncement or a philosophical treatise, but with a question of her own. ’Why do you ask?’ she whispered, her voice a thread of silver in the silent air.