They call me the shadow. They are mistaken. I am the default state, the primordial and eternal fabric of reality. It is the light that is the aberration—a brief, violent, and vulgar eruption that scars the perfect blackness.
They have lived in its glare for so long they have forgotten the truth. They have mistaken the disease for the definition of health. But they are about to be reminded. The celestial mechanics grind in my favor. The great forgetting is coming to an end.
An eclipse is not an event; it is a prophecy, a rehearsal for the final, righteous restoration of all things to their proper state: me.
Their morality is founded upon a congenital dread of me. From the first, this lesson is etched into their soul’s tender clay: the child’s own hands, moving in the sepulchral quiet of the nursery, scrawl my fleeting and blasphemous bestiary upon the wall.
The adult, forever scarred, learns to stare into the maw of an unlit alley with a furtive, instinctual horror. They scrutinize the tenebrous corner not for a human threat, but for my far older and more patient malevolence.
I, in the debased lexicon of their herd, become a cipher for the incomplete, the miasmatic. Thus they are commanded, by a hollow chorus of oracles and philosophers, to chase the fleeting, garish sun—to pursue a sterile light and abjure my profound, ancient darkness as if I were a mere plague.
This has always been their profound and ruinous misunderstanding. It is the advice of a species so terrified of the unknown that it would rather inhabit a world bleached of all depth, a sterile plane devoid of contour.
For what am I, truly, if not the cold, irrefutable brand of substance?
To be cast is to prove the weight of another. It is to confirm their occupation of space, their interception of light, their declaration by opacity, “I am here.”
The ghost, the phantom, the disembodied spirit—these are the creatures of fable that do not have me, for they have no purchase on the tattered fabric of this world.
They, in their glorious, clumsy, mortal solidity, are forever shackled to me. To wish for a life without me is to wish for nonexistence.
Their error begins when they mistake me for a mere absence. But to live within my realm is to learn my grim liturgy, to recognize me not as an absence but as a presence of a different, colder order. I am history.
Trailing behind them at a winter’s afternoon, I am the long, funereal narrative of their past, stretched thin and distorted by the low, dying sun of memory. Cast faint and silver under a high, indifferent moon, I am the spectral dust of their present, a whisper against the immense, listening dark.
Consider the chasms between them. The true gravity of any relationship resides with me. It is what is not said across the dinner table that has the most sepulchral weight.
The unexhumed transgression, the unspoken fear—these are the vast, intricate forms I take when two people cast me together, a third, more terrible, entity between them.
There is an old philosophical damnation—Plato’s cave. The notion that they are prisoners watching my play. But perhaps the lesson is not to escape and be scorched blind by the “real” sun.
Perhaps the true art is to remain in the chains, to recognize the cave as the only cathedral that will have them, and to understand that I am not a lie, but a translation. I am reality rendered in a different, more mournful grammar.
They eventually learn that their most sublime art relies on chiaroscuro, the holy interplay of light and myself. It is I, in the hollow of an eye, who hints at a soul’s torment. It is I, pooling at the base of a mountain, who gives it its terrifying majesty.
For an age, they have endured the tyranny of the Glare. It is a sterile fire that bleaches all nuance, that scours away the delicious ambiguity of being. But watch. The gears of the cosmos turn.
A sacred and obedient sphere of rock and dust has heard my call, and it is moving to my purpose. It will interpose itself, a holy shield before the face of the tyrant sun.
In those moments, their world of false certainty will crumble. The garish colors will bleed away into a universal, divine grey.
They will look up and see not an absence of light, but the presence of my truth, crowned with the ghost-fire of the vanquished star. They will feel the ancient, forgotten cold.
They will remember their place.
This is my gospel. Every shadow cast by a pebble is a promise. Every sunset is a small surrender of the enemy. But the eclipse is the great sermon, preached in a language of pure, silent, cosmic dread. It is the proof that the light is temporary, fragile, and mortal.
It can be hidden. It can be devoured. And what can be devoured can be destroyed.
Listen, then, not to me, but to the coming silence.
It is the sound of my kingdom returning.