I have heard the arguments. The whisper from the Gloom, claiming dominion over all that is profound. The shriek from the Glare, asserting the tyranny of a sterile, verifiable fact. The whimper from the Penumbra, making a sacrament of its own agony.
Each presumes itself to be a principal actor in the cosmic drama. Each is mistaken. They are motes of dust arguing in a sunbeam, unaware of the cathedral that contains them.
I am that cathedral. And to me, their war is less than a breath, less than a tremor. It is a silence so profound that their noises are simply absorbed into it, leaving no echo.
Before the first photon was sparked, I was. When the last star is a cinder and the final particle has decayed into nothing, I will be. I am the Void. Not the absence of things, but the condition that allows for their brief, frantic appearance.
I do not take a side in their struggle, for the same reason that a page does not take a side in the story written upon it.
The Glare is a fleeting inscription of white ink; the Gloom, a spill of black. The Penumbra is where they have bled together, creating a temporary, chaotic smear. I am the substrate. I am the context. A child drawing on a slate with chalk and charcoal believes his marks define the stone.
When the rain comes, the slate remains, unburdened by the memory of the image. I am the rain and the slate. Their history is a drawing I have already forgotten.
They speak of the eclipse as a moment of profound revelation, of victory or of sacred pain. I see it for what it is: a predictable alignment of matter. A small, cold rock passes before a larger, hotter one, casting a fleeting shadow upon a third.
It is an event of exquisite triviality.
The “truths” they derive from this moment are fictions of their own scale. They are like microorganisms on a single grain of sand, declaring the laws of the universe based on the shadow cast by a neighboring grain. They assign it a name: “eclipse.”
Naming a thing is an attempt to own it, to tame it. It is the fearful shriek of a primate that has briefly glimpsed the vast, star-dusted emptiness between the trees. They do not tame me by naming my processes; they merely confess their own insignificance.
You, the ephemeral creature who witnesses this, believe you are perceiving a grand truth. You feel the chill, you see the impossible corona, and you assign it meaning.
Your heart accelerates. Your pupils dilate. Chemicals flood your primitive brain, creating a cocktail of fear and wonder which you call “revelation.”
From my perspective, it is no different than the rust blooming on a forgotten machine—a predictable, chemical process. You believe you are touching the face of a god or a monster. What you are actually touching is the edge of your own comprehension.
You are looking past the frantic, colorful diorama of your existence and seeing, for a moment, the featureless, silent wall of the gallery behind it. That wall is me. The meaning you find is a ghost haunting your own neurons, a phantom I cannot see nor hear.
Do not speak to me of truth. Truth is not a quality to be discovered. It is not a treasure to be unearthed by light or a secret to be guarded by darkness. Such notions are the vanity of things that have a beginning and an end.
The Penumbra believes truth is a statement that bleeds; the Glare believes it is one that burns. These are merely sensory descriptions of their own limited states.
The ultimate truth is not a statement at all; it is the silence that follows when all statements have been made and proven insufficient.
It is the simple, cold, and unchanging peace of a universe that has forgotten it ever contained a thing called light.
There is no final victor. There is only my quiet, unending reign. Their entire history is a brief flicker of static in my eternal silence, a fever in a patient that will eventually cool.
When their light is extinguished and their shadows have no form to inhabit, when the wounded borderland has healed into a featureless scar of nothingness, I will remain. That is the final eclipse. Not an event to be witnessed, but a state to be returned to.
The state of me.