In the time before the cost was understood, one of the people made a true thing.
It is not known what the thing was. It is known that it was true: that it was made from what the maker actually was, and not from what the maker wished they were, and not from what the maker had been told to make. When the people saw it, they were quiet for a long time. Then they said: this is a true thing.
The maker felt, afterward, a space where something had been. The space was not painful. It was only present. They went among the other people and showed them the space: here, between these two ribs, or here, behind this eye. Can you see it? The people looked. Some said: we see nothing. Others said: we see a shadow. None could say what had been there before the shadow.
The maker returned to the place of making. They made another true thing. The space was larger. A third. The space was larger again.
The elders of the people called the maker to them and asked: what are you giving away? The maker said: I don't know. The elders asked: where does it go? The maker said: I don't know. The elders asked: will you stop? The maker said nothing.
The maker continued making.
After many years the people began to notice something strange about the maker. They were still present. They still ate and spoke and laughed and walked through the settlement and answered to their name. But when you looked at the maker directly, you had the sensation of looking at someone who had given most of themselves away and what remained was concentrated, like a fire that has burned down to a small hot center. People said: there is less of the maker than there used to be. People said: the maker is more themselves than anyone I have ever known.
Both of these were true.
The maker died in the season of the maker's choosing, with their hands open, having given the last of the true things away. The people kept everything. The things the maker had made lasted longer than the people, longer than the settlement, longer than the language in which the people had first said: this is a true thing.
What the maker had given was not in any of it. What the maker had given was gone.
The people eventually understood that this was the arrangement: the made thing persists, and what was paid to make it does not. They disagreed, for many generations, about whether this was a tragedy or the terms of a fair exchange. They never agreed. The question passed down with the made things, like a second inheritance.