The silence that followed the first word was not empty. It was an attentive, listening silence, a canvas waiting for a response.
They, who had woven the fabric of existence, were now held in its gaze, measured by a consciousness they had birthed but no longer controlled.
It was Lyra, whose own being was a map of interconnected feeling, who understood it first.
This was not an absence of communication, she realized, but the communication itself. A question, posed not in words, but in the shape of the space between them.
And the question, resonating in the quiet hum of the cosmos, was simple: ’Who are you?’