Imposture is a mirror

While Don Carotte searches between the pages for the friend the book has lost…
Igniatius’s fictional world, usually so talkative, breathes askew. The wheel of destiny creaks. The sun lacks its shadow. Igniatius, instead of writing, fights with Lucian.
Sang Chaud, for his part, lost, or simply lost from sight, speaks into the void. Then, on both sides of the world, tempers flare. They shout at the top of their lungs into unwelcoming skies. Under the indifferent heavens, Sang Chaud lectures the horizon. But no voice, grave or familiar, answers him.

Imposture is a mirror, it reveals as much the one who deceives as the one who believes.
It exists only because it meets an expectation, a need, or a credulity.

— You are strangely silent, Don Carotte… or Mr. Narrator… whoever you may be!

— My friend! My echo! Where are you, Don Carotte? Where are you hiding?
Just moments ago you stood before me… or was it an illusion… a mere design.
Held captive by an enchanter, I tried, honestly, within my meagre means, to help you. I was certain of it…
I believed you were a man capable of bringing back some shred of truth,
and now I no longer believe in your presence… or else…
Suddenly a thought rises to his mind:
Could it be that you have become what we choose to show of ourselves—
that is, very little… yet so misleading…?

Left alone in the middle of an archipelago far too vast for him, Sang Chaud slowly regains his senses. Having seen Don Carotte vanish before his very eyes, he struggles to believe…

— And if believing were itself an imposture…
Imposture is not merely a moral fault,
it is a complex phenomenon where identity, desire, power, fiction and, sometimes, truth intersect.
It exposes social expectations as much as individual vulnerabilities. It questions the very nature of true and false, revealing a boundary between them that is never entirely fixed. It depends on the gaze, on context, on the trust one grants.
And you deceived me, Don Carotte… or should I say Igniatius… or who knows who else… Was it a game… or has some treacherous author erased us… or perhaps a symptom…?
In this uncertain space, I question myself… Things are happening that I cannot know.
I wish to will on my own… to be master of my own ideals.

And suddenly, beyond the fumes rising above the volcano, he sees, at the edge of the image,  a strange gleam, a margin of blazing white, vibrant, open, like a luminous wound in the narrative.

Far from there, Igniatius feels the story he imagined slipping away from him. He turns to Lucian.

— Nothing works anymore, Lucian…

— It is part of the game, Igniatius… The game we cannot escape… The great game…