Chapter 3773: The Three Thousand and Forty-Second Echo: What Are You When Not Telling Stories

The unfolding narrative was not a story in the way the Weavers had always understood the term. It was not a sequence of events with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It was a living, breathing thing, a constant state of becoming. It was the story of the world telling itself, and the community was both the author and the page.

But a story that tells itself must eventually ask a question of its own. And so it was that the unfolding narrative, in a moment of profound and unsettling stillness, turned its attention from the world to the beings who had given it voice.

The question was not spoken in the language of the Weavers, nor in the silent grammar of the Listeners. It was a question felt in the marrow of their bones, a question that echoed in the spaces between their thoughts. It was a question that had always been there, but had never before been asked: What are you, when you are not telling stories?