Truth Matters Book Novels & Stories

The Fragment pulsed. Then: "WHAT IS TRUTH?" The World Tree lowered its head. Then: "Answer." Silence. Then Thomas thought. Really thought. About everything. About Aurelius. About Arkan. About the First Ones. About the war. About Lily. Then: "The truth changes." The Fragment dimmed. Immediately. Wrong answer. Then: "No." Then Thomas tried again. Then: "The truth hurts." The Fragment remained silent. Still wrong. Then the roars came again. Much closer now.

And every time, I forgave him without hesitation. [Don't be fooled just because the kid is young. He's a fantastic liar.] [When he was eating with the male lead, he even called the supporting male lead an old loser!] [Having a son like that really makes you feel bad for the supporting male lead. The son's an ingrate.] Those comments sent a chill down my spine. I could not believe that the child standing in front of me had been helping his mother deceive me for so long, despite only being five years old. But the truth was right there in front of me. I had no choice but to believe it.

He was playing with his words, giving me just enough to keep me hooked but not enough to give me real answers. “Why won’t you just tell me?” Alden’s eyes darkened slightly, and for a moment, I thought he might actually answer. But instead, he simply leaned forward, his voice dropping lower, his presence pressing into mine, “Because, Nyx…” He murmured, “Some truths are better left forgotten.” A chill ran down my spine. I opened my mouth to argue, but before I could push further, there was a sudden knock at the door. Liam’s voice carried through, “Alden, we have a problem.”

Bubbles of air choked her throat, keeping the whispers back, letting out only a stutter at best. Monica took the King James Version Bible, raised it up with a hand and nervously gulped down, different panic and guilt thoughts raced through her head but she dismissed them - not totally. "I solemnly state I will tell the truth without hiding or adding anything and I should be punished for false testimonies if I lie." Her voice sounded mechanical, like the voice of a person reciting something written. I implore you to say the truth, just this once!

"Even when the truth is inconvenient." She sat with this. The specific weight of a man telling her something true and then not requiring anything from the telling — not reciprocation, not response, not the performance of being moved. Just the truth, placed on the table, hers to do with as she chose. She thought about the list in the back of her book. Things I know are true. She would add this. Not what it meant — that was too large to categorise yet. Just the fact of it. That he had said it. That it was true.

“When I started writing this book, it wasn’t to explain myself. It wasn’t to defend anything. It was just… to tell the truth as I experienced it.” I paused slightly, glancing down at my notes but not really needing them. “And I think somewhere along the way, I realized something important. That truth doesn’t need to be perfect to be valid.” I looked up again. “I made mistakes. I hurt people. I was also hurt. Those things can exist at the same time.” Richard’s eyes stayed on me, but he didn’t interrupt. I continued. “I spent a long time thinking I had to choose between being honest and being understood. I don’t think that’s true anymore.”

He came back. "There are things I'm not able to tell you tonight," he said. Not an apology. A statement of fact. "Not because I'm protecting myself." "Then what are you protecting?" He turned and looked at her and something in his face was tired in a way she hadn't seen before, not the performed weariness of a man at the end of a long event, but the genuine kind, the kind that lived deep and had been living there a long time. "Someone else," he said. "If I'm wrong about how much I can trust you, telling you would put that person at risk."

"What is driving your involvement here. Professional interest. Personal alignment. Or ambition." "Truth," he said. The simplicity of the word was almost disarming. People who claim complex motivations are generally protecting something. People who say simply truth have usually examined themselves closely enough to mean it. "Truth rarely travels alone," I replied. "It tends to attract reputation alongside it." "I value truth more than comfort," he said. The sentence settled between us with a weight I had not entirely anticipated.

“How did you get so wise?” “Seventy-eight years of living.” She pulled me into a hug and let me cry on her shoulder. “Truth always wins in the end. You know why? Because lies need constant work. Someone has to keep feeding them. Truth just sits there. Harrison’s lies will fall apart eventually. We just have to outlast them.” “Will they really?” “Yes. Always. It might take time, but the truth is patient, and so are we.”

He stopped ten feet from the Acoustic Prism, the shifting, violet light of the artifact reflecting in his cold, grey eyes. “Stop the upload, Evangeline,” Vaughn commanded, his tone shifting from polite to absolute. “You think you’re waking the world up, but you’re just inviting a scream that will never end. Do you have any idea what the Truth does to a mind that has been nurtured on comfortable lies for three generations? It’s not liberation; it’s a psychotic break.” He gestured toward the ceiling, as if he could see through the miles of rock and steel to the millions of people living in the valley above.