The Weight of Lies

Title: The Weight of Lies

Book of Lies Pg 38

A warning: “Just because something isn’t real doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you. A lie is not real, it is fabricated, entirely made up, but oh, how sharp its teeth can bite. It is said that it is a tangled web we weave when one doth practice to beguile and deceive. One must take care not to get caught in their own web of lies for sometimes it is the creator of such fallacies that gets snared instead of flies.”

Veylarith was a city that had forgotten rudimentary things like rules and kindness and to some extent reality. The city stretched beneath a bruised sky, with towers that leaned over like weary old men minus a cane of course. The streets were narrow enough for only one shadow to pass at a time. Elara looked up at the tall dilapidated buildings. Broken windows stared like blank, watchful eyes watching her every move. Elara paused righting herself from almost slipping. The stones beneath her boots were uneven and slick with soot and the residue of a hundred forgotten storms. Her footsteps echoed down the alleyways as if announcing her arrival. She passed by a building and scratched a mark on her ledger. It was purchased by a lie she told a merchant. She told a man she overheard people saying gold was buried in the walls and floorboards. She meant it to be merely a jest. Then before she knew it the man had dumped his fortune into the old house and spent weeks tearing up the walls and floors. He soon became a penniless misery that now begs for scraps down by the docks. I was only nine why did he believe me?

A thick choking fog spilled in from the river. It curled around the edges of the city, swallowing sounds. It twisted the shapes of buildings until they seemed almost, well wrong. Elara passed by alleyways where shadows whispered rumors of a thing that never was. Some form of a truth that somehow had never existed. Oh but it left painful marks on hearts and bodies alike in the wake of its creation.

Elara walked through the street with careful steps, a ledger clasped to her chest like a talisman or rosary. It was filled with lies she tried to contain. She counted lies as others counted coins, but alas each one has left a mark on this town. Elara documented each one with a inky scratch. The whisper in the walls, a tremor beneath the floors, a bitter taste of iron on the tongue. Once, she had believed the lies to be harmless things. A child's game of merely soft distortions told to ease pain, or spare someone the cruelty of life’s hard truths. She had learned otherwise on a night that still clung to her like smoke. There was a fire, though she could never remember how it began, only how it ended. A woman screaming and door she told herself was locked and can never be opened. For a moment truth hovered on her tongue, quick, and saving, but no t'was not to be. For Elara chose instead a gentler story instead. One that absolved her: It is too late. There is nothing to be done. It was an accident. I didn’t mean to play with the candle. My mom shouldn’t have thrown me out of the window. she could have made it out of the fire. It was her fault.

She had believed it then, or forced herself to. By morning, the lie had rooted itself so deeply that even memory bent around it, reshaping the night into something survivable if only in her mind. But the city of Veylarith had not forgotten. Lies never did. They lingered, grew fangs, and waited. The city harbored them and knew them well. It had learned to shelter them like vermin in the cracks. She could feel the lies watching her from doorways, sniffing from gutters, curling up like cats behind shutters. The ledger was her penance. Each recorded falsehood a futile attempt to cage what she had once set loose. Each one she cataloged was a cut into the world’s fabric, a thin tear in the air that smelled of acrid ink, old smoke, and ethereal rot. A tremor passed through her. She had seen what lies of others could do: a child who forgot her mother’s face, a man who mistook foes for friends, a lover who held a phantom in his arms and wept for the warmth that never existed. Lies have a way of burrowing deep and taking root once sown, they do not rest. In Veylarith, they spread unchecked, thick as summer weeds, choking all truth that dares to speak.

She found herself in the city’s underbelly facing a theater abandon by time. The theater called to her next. It was tucked between two leaning warehouses, its windows cracked and glazed with grime. Once, it had been a place for laughter and music, but that was long before the lies moved in. The heavy wooden doors bore a lion’s head that would not stay a lion, its noble shape slipping, trembling, into a silent screaming mask. She pressed her hand to the door and, with a breath that did not quite belong to her, pushed it open.

Everything appeared to be glazed in soot and held together by cobwebs. She sensed the lies had grown jagged teeth and there was a palpable hunger in the air. The scrape of wooden chairs trying to gnaw at the floorboards was drowned out by the rusted chains that shivered in the drafts. The air itself seemed to quiver with unspoken, no bound truths. Elara felt the lure of it like a poisonous song that promised answers, even if those answers would eat her alive. She let out a breath and with a funereal slowness entered the building. She sensed the patient summoning of some type of wraith or phantom that somehow had already learned her name.

With each step shadows coiled around Elara’s ankles like serpents, whispering her name in voices that were not quite voices.

“ Oh tis nothing,” she told herself.

“Tis nothing, and nothing here can harm me here.”

She stacked her own lies upon the ancient ones riddled inside this place.

And yet, somewhere behind the velvet stage curtain, something stirred and whether fabricated, imagined, or unreal, it reached outward, stretching slowly and patiently, toward the fragile marrow of Elara’s bones.

“I’m not afraid.” She whispered

Yet her betraying heart sped up like a possessed metronome. After all what’s one more lie when you are standing in an ocean of deceit. She passed a fountain of thick black liquid, almost as if water, ink, and some sort of ichor had mixed together. She saw reflections in the pooling darkness. Images of large child’s eyes that blinked far too slowly to be human, a man’s grotesque mouth that twisted in impossible ways, and even a woman laughing hysterically with far too many teeth. A shudder rippled through her. The faces whispered a single truth, broken and false: You are not safe. Why did you come?

She shook head and tore it away from the hideous faces in an effort to find courage she didn’t feel. She looked around in the darkness. It felt strangely not empty. It had weight like water, and the stifling air seem to congeal with a thickness like honey gone bad. It was getting hard to breath. Every shadow was sharper here, edged with the faint glint of pointy teeth. Chairs groaned as if settling into old wounds. A hushing sound echoed as the floorboards whispered beneath her steps. And from somewhere deep in the stage’s black heart came the softest of voices.

“You should not have come.”

This time Elara froze. The words were not loud, but they cut through the fog in her mind like razor wire, scraping her bones. Her ledger slipped, thudding softly against the floor, and she swallowed the taste of fear. She could feel the presence behind the curtain. Oh, how tolerant, and deliberate it was, with a pulse of something ancient and invented, something that had grown in the space between lies.

Was it expecting her? She wondered

A breeze or perhaps possibly a breath brushed her neck. It smelled of ash and old ink, of wet paper and miasma of rotting fruit. The shadows began to twist, and the theater itself seemed to exhale, bending the walls closer. The ceiling began to sag downward to fold inward on itself. Elara’s heart hammered against her ribs like a warning drum. Every instinct screamed to flee, yet her feet remained rooted. She was drawn forward by curiosity, by dread, by the impossible fascination of a story she had been born to witness.

What lie lies behind the curtain. She thought

Then the curtain and what lay scheming behind it, something not real yet real enough waited, patient as rot, quietly learning the shape of the girl that was meant to enter its domain.

A reverberating voice intoned “Step closer child,” it said. It trembled, a thin, feverish shiver threading its seams. It felt its own threshold fraying, as though it knew that what presence pressed against it and how it was not wicked, but the power of raw truth. The entity trembled part from terror and part from a sick twisted lust for pain. Elara took a few steps forward and pulled at the curtain. The curtain did not part. It unraveled. Threads loosened themselves as though tugged by invisible fingers. The velvet sagged inward. It folded into the stage to a depth that could not belong to any architecture shaped by sane hands. Elara did not move. Her breath came shallow, each inhale tasting of mold and memory.

Something shifted behind the disintegrating curtain. Not a body. Not even a shadow per se. It had the aching feeling of a broken promise that one wishes with every fiber of there being was real. It was not quite a lie not quite a truth but perhaps a suggestion of both.

The voice was wrong in a way that twisted language itself, like a sound too crooked, too alive, to be captured by mere words. It did not enter her ears so much as it bloomed inside her skull, unfolding like a bruise across her thoughts and mind. Each syllable carried a leveled weight, a tiered history, laced with contradiction and poison. It sounded like truth remembered incorrectly from a witness that wasn’t really there.

Elara’s foot slid forward before she knew she had moved. The boards beneath her softened, bending slightly, as though the theater were no longer made of wood but of something more pliable.

Her ledger lay behind her, forgotten. That alone should have been enough to break the enchanted spell. It had never left her side. Not once. Not even in sleep. The damn thing had the drool marks to prove it. But the thing behind the curtain knew that.

“You dropped it,” the voice whispered, with a softness of a mother’s kindness.

“You always hold it so tightly. As if it might keep you from, well becoming something you wish to naught be.”

A flicker of memory surfaced. Her mother’s voice, or perhaps something that had learned to wear it.

Elara squeezed her eyes shut. Don’t believe what you cannot verify. The thought shattered as soon as it formed. The curtain split further with a sound of ripping flesh.Elara saw, not what was there, but rather what could not be there. An impossible anomaly.Was it the lie or was is the truth? Is this thing real?

The stage stretched impossibly deep, vanishing into a corridor lined with doors. Thousands and each one perplexingly different. Some were ornate, dripping with gold that sagged like wax. Others were crude, nailed together from splintered wood and bone. Elara let out a slow breath.

Every door was slightly ajar, watching her and luring and her in. Her stomach tightened. A scintilla of truth from somewhere within herself whispered this is wrong. This was not the theater. This was not even a place, it's not real. It was a structure made of implication, of narrative and of things that had been spoken but never quite true.

“Each one,” the voice hissed, closer now, almost beside her, “is a lie you’ve recorded. Or even perhaps the ones you might have missed. Tsk Tsk no one’s perfect after all child. Why tis not your fault. Sometimes lies grow wings and fly away.” It projected

Something brushed her shoulder. Elara flinched violently, spinning around she swung at the air, but there was nothing behind her. Only the ghost of rows of seats remained, slumped and staring like an audience long dead, yet unwilling to take its leave.

When she turned back to the corridor it had shifted. The doors were closer now.

One creaked open further with a slow, deliberate sound. Inside, she glimpsed a room. It was small, dim but vaguely familiar. A woman sitting with her back turned. Her breath caught.

“No,” Elara whispered.

The woman tilted her head, just slightly. Not enough to reveal her face. Just enough to suggest recognition. An almost forgotten familiar face loomed in the darkness.

“You never wrote this one down did you E-lar-Ahhhh,” the voice murmured, almost tender but with the stab of truth. “You told yourself it wasn’t a lie. That it was… a mercy I suppose. Perhaps to sleep at night or keep the monsters away.”

Then the smell hit her then, so sharp, nearly suffocating thick. Her eyes stung. A sickeningly sweet, cloying smoke drifted all around her. And beneath it, burned flesh. Elara staggered back, her heel catching on something soft. She looked down.

The floor had changed. No longer wood. Pages. Thousands upon thousands of pages, layered thick beneath her feet. Each page was covered in tight, frantic angry script. The words were intentional and filled with hate. Ink bled upward on its own accord. It pooled around her boots, clinging like oil. Words shifted as she looked at them, rearranging, correcting themselves into new lies, new contradictions. A sentence coiled itself around her ankle like a living thing. Lies holding her in their spell refusing to let go.

“You let her burn. Didn’t you? It was your fault wasn’t it?” A voice whispered.

She screamed and tore free, stumbling forward toward the corridor, toward the impossible doors. The theater groaned around her, pleased or pained, she could not tell.

“You see?” the voice said, and now it was everywhere. Beneath her feet. Inside her ribs. Behind her eyes. Bouncing around inside her skull. “Not real. Never real. And yet somehow…”

The door swung open fully. The woman inside turned. Elara saw her face. And the world broke. Not shattered, no no, no, that would imply clean edges, with a comprehensible ruin piece by piece. This was something deeper. Something more explosive. Reality bent like rotting wood, collapsing inward under the weight of what should not be seen. Heat vapors shimmered in the air.

The woman’s face was Elara’s own. But somehow, wrong. Smiling. Burning.

“You remember now,” it spoke not with a voice, but with certainty.

The flames draped it, clinging like molten silk to every curve, licking and twisting with a cruel intimacy. They curled along her skin, not to burn but to know, to expose what hid beneath the fragile shell of flesh. And beneath the blaze, something squirmed. Something that was hers but not hers, a parasite wearing her shape. It was patient with malevolent devotion, as it writhed in the heat as if the fire itself were its accomplice. The air smelled of scorched innocence and forbidden muttered secrets. Elara gasped. The hissing flames whispered back, painfully remembering, deeply hungering.

Elara felt her knees buckle and give.

“I didn’t.”

The words died in her throat. Because the lie would not form. Not here. Not in this place where lies had weight, and teeth and bones and memory.

“You did,” the thing said gently. “There, there, now child, you simply chose a better story.”

The doors began to open. All of them. A slow, endless cascade of creaking hinges and whispered confessions echoed. The corridor filled with sound, superimposed voices layered atop one another, each telling a different version of the same truth, each contradicting the last.

Elara clutched her head screaming, unable to separate them and unable to breathe through the flood of almost-truths and half-lies.

The thing stepped forward from the burning room. Not quite walking but resolving.

It became clearer with each impossible step, its shape stabilizing in the way nightmares do just before they take hold and swallow completely.

“We are what you make of us,” it said. “Every lie, every omission, every kindness sharpened into cruelty by your silence. We are not real. And yet here we are.”

It reached for her. Its hand was her hand. Its skin was paper-thin, and beneath it,

Words moved. “We are better than real. We are so much better than the truth.”

Elara tried to run. But the pages beneath her feet tightened, crawling up her ankles, wrapping around her legs, climbing higher, pulling her down into the weight of everything she had ever chosen not to say. The weight from the silence of omission and the unspoken truth grew too heavy and collapsed the floor.

She heard a shrill voice like wind chimes “Oh what a tangled web we weave when one doesn’t stop those who practice to deceive.”

The last thing she saw before the darkness closed over her was dark eyes glowing from the theater. A face she had forgotten framed in flames.

“Mommy” Elara cried

Eyes of insidious hunger in its rawest primal form watched her demise. Waiting for her complete suffocation.

Followed by silence and an utter absence of truth.