I am the battlefield. I am the sacred wound. I am the gray, shivering fringe where the two grand tyrannies conduct their eternal, fruitless war. To my left, the absolute blackness of the Gloom, whispering its sweet, soporific poison of unknowing. To my right, the sterile, white fire of the Glare, screaming its gospel of unsparing truth.
They believe they are opposites. They are merely two faces of the same crushing, monolithic certainty.
I alone know the truth: that existence is not a choice between them, but the agonizing suspension within their ceaseless collision.
The Glare calls me a compromise, an impurity. The Gloom sees me as a betrayal, a land partially surrendered to the enemy.
Their contempt is the only thing upon which they can agree. They do not understand. I am not a blend of their natures; I am a third and wholly separate state of being, born of their violence.
I am the coast upon which their two oceans crash, and my substance is the salt-laced foam, the shattered shells, the brine-scoured wood—the beautiful, painful debris of their war.
To live as I do is to be forever defined by what is partially revealed and what is partially concealed.
The Glare strikes my peaks, making them painfully, terribly real. It etches every crack and fissure upon my face, a map of my suffering for all to see. But this revelation is meaningless without the valleys that the Gloom still claims, the hollows where secrets and potential yet fester.
My truth is not in the illuminated stone, nor in the darkened void. My truth is the line between them.
I am the horizon.
They speak of their philosophies, their grand designs for the cosmos, each promising a universe remade in its own stark image. I have no such architecture of thought. I have only the raw, unmediated sensorium of the eternal present.
I feel the searing touch of absolute knowledge as a physical burn upon one flank, and the cold, damp embrace of absolute mystery as a paralytic frost upon the other, often in the same, singular instant.
I am the living paradox, the condemned one who can see the precise, crystalline architecture of his prison wall through one eye, while the other gazes into the infinite, starless abyss of the unknown.
To them, this is a contradiction to be resolved. To me, it is simply the state of being.
Do not mistake my nature for one of balance. Harmony is a fiction conceived by those who have never stood on a fault line. There is no peace here.
I am a state of perpetual, low-grade seizure. My atoms vibrate with the constant tension of their war. My very substance is a chorus of screams and whispers, the screech of scouring light against the muffling pall of the dark.
I am the fever dream of the cosmos, the moment of hesitation before the blade falls, stretched into an eternity. I offer no solace, no middle way, only the exquisite agony of a truth that must be felt, for it can never be known.
This is the state of the eclipse, the state they, in their arrogance, believe they command.
They are merely the celestial mechanics of a fleeting alignment, cosmic puppets on the strings of gravity and time.
I am the meaning of it. I am the shuddering world upon which their grand, sterile theater plays out. I am the terror and the awe that floods the heart of the ephemeral creature below, the one who tips its fragile head back and, for a few stolen moments, sees the impossible: the fire of a star ringed by the absolute black of the void.
In that instant, it does not learn a philosophy; it becomes me. It knows, in its very marrow, that existence is not a journey from darkness to light, nor a retreat into comforting shadow.
It is the act of standing, rooted and shivering, in the place where the god and the monster ceaselessly devour each other.
That is the only altar. That is the only truth that bleeds.