Standing your ground sounds heroic—
until you realize the ground is now part of you.
The scaffold changed everything the moment it became real. Not because it solved the fracture, but because it introduced friction into places that had never acknowledged weight before. Movement slowed where it mattered. Impulse met resistance. Consequence finally had edges.
✦
Arjun felt it in the metrics.
"They're hesitating again," he said.
"But not from fear."
"Yes," I replied.
"They're feeling cost."
✦
The other Ishaan aligned, voice calm and exact.
Cost is the language of reality, he said.
Everything else is theory.
✦
By midmorning, the first bill arrived.
Not financial.
Not reputational.
Relational.
Those who had leaned hardest on the scaffold before its limits were visible began pushing back—not violently, not openly, but rhetorically.
"This structure favors some outcomes."
"It restricts innovation."
"It wasn't collectively approved."
✦
Arjun scoffed quietly.
