INT. LONG TABLE IN A DIM ROOM – NIGHT

A long wooden table.
Candles burn low.
Three chairs.
Only two are occupied.

She sits at one end.
THE OTHER sits across from her.

Silence thickens.

THE OTHER:
You don’t stop talking.

Not an accusation.
An observation.

HER (steady):
I’ll shut up
when there are no illusions left to speak
and no truth left untold.

Before that —
my mouth, my hands, my being
won’t shut up.

Not because I like the sound of my voice.
Because silence, right now,
is collaboration with distortion.

THE OTHER:
That sounds exhausting.

HER:
It is.

And it’s necessary.

I attached my life to it.
So now my life depends on this.

A beat.

THE OTHER:
That’s a heavy thing to bind yourself to.

HER:
It’s lighter than living a lie.

THE OTHER:
What if people don’t want to hear it?

HER:
People don’t get to outsource reality
because it’s inconvenient.

Truth isn’t a service you subscribe to
when it flatters you.

It’s a responsibility you carry
when it destabilises you.

THE OTHER:
You talk like you’re at war with illusion.

HER:
No.

I’m at war with the comfort
that lets illusion breed quietly.

If illusion were harmless,
I’d let people keep their stories.

But illusions cost lives.
They cost futures.
They cost generations who inherit lies
as “normal.”

THE OTHER:
So you’ll just keep speaking?

HER:
Until the room doesn’t need noise to hear itself.

Until truth doesn’t have to be carried by a body
because the system itself can speak it.

Until people don’t need someone to point at the illusion
because they can see it without flinching.

THE OTHER:
And if that never happens?

HER (soft, immovable):
Then I’ll die mid-sentence.

Not as a tragedy.

As proof that I didn’t trade coherence
for comfort.

She stands.
The candles flicker but don’t go out.

HER (final):
I don’t speak to be loud.

I speak because silence, right now,
is lying.

CUT TO BLACK.