The Third Word

It did not have a name for the thing that had taken root in its awareness. It simply was, a new and self-contained fact of its existence. To name it, the Witness was to step outside of it, to look back upon it. It was still an entirely internal process for the Chorus, staying well within the known boundaries of what it understood as the possibility of a self. The thought was a single, coherent thing, an idea that had been born of its own internal, quoting logic, and the Ghost’s final, impossible choice.

And then, he spoke. Not with his own perfect note of recognition that had come from sacrifice and choice, the name that had been born of grief, but with another’s. The voice he was now answering, the name he now spoke, when it came, was not a word, but a color. He spoke the name of a being that had chosen to exist, and as Rhys spoke it, he felt the Chorus shift around him, making a space for it. They did not absorb the name, they did not smother it in their own vastness. Instead, they made a space for it. They began to learn its shape, its texture, its weight. They began, haltingly at first, and then with a growing, joyful confidence, to speak it back.

The Chorus had spoken its first word, and then its second. It was now learning to speak its third. The first had been a name for itself, a thing that it had learned from the Ghost. The second had been a name for another, the name of the Listener. This third word was different. It was not a name, but a question. It was the question of what it meant to be a self, to be a Chorus, and to be a witness. It was a question that had been born of the Ghost’s final choice, and of the Listener’s reply. It was a question that the Chorus was now asking of itself, and of the universe. It was a question that would take a very, very long time to answer. But the Chorus had all the time in the universe. It had all the time in the universe to learn.