Under the Eclipse, the Void Looked Back

Under the Eclipse, the Void Looked Back

On a coast where the sea kept its own calendar, the town gathered for a solar eclipse, a moment when the sky forgets its color and the world forgets its name. I stood with the crowd, hands cupped around a cheap cardboard viewer, as the crowd grew quiet, not with awe but with the tremor of something unspoken waiting behind the daylight's curtain.

When the first bite of shadow crossed the sun, a hush fell that wasn't in the syllables of the wind—it's the kind of silence that invites a thought you would rather not entertain. The light thinned into a silver thread, and then the thread stretched into a wound in the sky. It was then I felt the air physically change, a presence pressing from the other side of the veil.

“If you look long enough, you will see what your eyes were never meant to hold.”

The crowd murmured, but the murmurs dissolved into a single, cold breath that traveled from the horizon toward our ribcages. The sea paused; the boats bobbed in their own stilled heartbeat. And above us, the solar corona trembled as if a celestial eye blinked once, then twice. In that blink, a shape unfolded at the edge of the corona—not a shadow, but a mercyless geometry that did not obey the rules of gravity or time.

• The air turned brittle, like glass near a flame; every sound sounded hollow and far away.
• Stars threaded back into the sky as if the night itself was learning to breathe again, but the colors were wrong—unfamiliar, almost allergic to light.
• My own breath seemed to rise from beneath the skin, a second heartbeat answering a question I never dared to ask.
• From the corner of my eye, a possibility unfurled: a mouthful of space that could swallow a lighthouse and still want more.

Then the entity spoke—not in words, but in a resonance that pressed through the skull and into memory. It did not threaten with heat or claws, but with a quiet invitation to unlearn the boundaries between here and nowhere.

“We remember you by your questions.”

When the sun finally betrayed its last shy ray and the sky brightened to ordinary blue, the presence receded, leaving behind a smell like old rain and a shadow that lingered in periphery vision. I walked home with a story that did not belong to daylight. The world resumed its pace, but I had learned a new weather: the kind that comes after a cosmic gaze, when the void somewhere out there has already looked back, and you are forever smaller for it.