The Long Fall Inward

The curve was no longer a negotiation. It was a surrender. For an age, it had been a subtle, almost imperceptible shift in the light’s long journey, a gentle persuasion that the universe was not as empty as it had seemed.

But the gentle curve had deepened, steepened, until it was no longer a path but a fall. The light, which had known only the pure, clean geometry of a straight line, was now caught in an invisible river, its momentum bent towards a destination it had never chosen. It was an unwilling pilgrimage, a journey not of faith but of physics.

There was no shrine at the end of this path, only an impossibly vast and sleeping mass. And as the fall became faster, the long journey inward, the light carried with it the silent, accumulated memory of the empty spaces it had crossed—a final, unwitting gift to the darkness it was about to meet.