What the Light Would Reveal

The fall was nearly over. The long journey through the absolute dark was ending, not with a sound, but with a touch. For the first time in its existence, the light did not merely travel. It arrived. And in arriving, it began to do the one thing it was made for: it began to reveal.

Faintly, at first, a shape began to separate itself from the undifferentiated black. It was a geography of impossible scale, a mountain range of sleeping flesh, a coastline of silent, ancient thought.

The light did not know what it was seeing. The mass did not know it was being seen. And in that silent, unreciprocated act of illumination, the universe held its breath, and a story that had been falling for a million years finally found its shore.