The thing is, the floodlights finally snapped on the way we would see a star vome into reality , which comes to astonish the time we have on earth harsh white cutting through Nero's summoned dark like knives through black silk the best way possible that we can have to shake the ideals of who can be known to the real world and the fictional. That is to say that the track field looked like a battlefield now: grass scorched in wing-shaped craters, dirt torn into furrows where shadow whips had lashed, air thick with the smell of ozone and burnt nothing and everything at the same time.
Nero stood at the center of what we could see as the great coming of age of the old ones and how it could shake the new one in a midnight skin gleaming wet with Basil's blood and his own violet ichor, six wings half-spread like torn voids, horns catching the light in cruel silver edges of fate. His sword still thick, still hard throbbed faintly with dark cosmos energy, as if the fight itself aroused him. That is to say that he is gay. Shadows coiled around his limbs like living chains, ready to bind, to erase, to fuck silence into every scream Basil had ever pulled from a woman.
Basil stood opposite shirt torn open, black star-sun symbol blazing now, red-blue light spilling across his chest like spilled dawn fighting back night the way a singularity would be brought down to zero. Sweat ran into his eyes. Breath steady. Sorrow in his chest no longer quiet it roared. Every life has death and every light has shadow. Be content to stand in the light and let the shadow fall where it will. That is to say that it could get worse but you chose to improve it.
Nero laughed low, resonant, vibrating through the ground.
Nero: You bleed. That is to say that your light flickers. Your sorrow is loud, but it is still mortal sorrow finite, fragile. I will fuck it quiet. The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even if you will eccentricity. I will bury my sword in you until every memory of cunt and tail and frost-rot becomes nothing. Until even your mother's name is erased from your tongue.
He lunged wings snapping wide, shadows surging forward in a tidal wave of absence.
Basil didn't dodge.
He closed his eyes.
And reached.
Not for Kun Peng. Not for succubus bloodline. Not for the foxfire still clinging to his skin.
For the portion.
The portion of Logos he had carried since the black star first burned into his chest—since the flux refused to kneel, since harmony learned to fuck instead of fight.
He didn't speak the word.
He became it.
The black star-sun erupted not light, not dark, but something between and beyond. Pure rational principle made weapon. Hidden harmony unbound. The unifying measure that binds opposites in tension so perfect it sings.
The air around him folded.
Not space. Not time.
Logic.
Nero's shadows hit the edge of that fold and stopped.
Not resisted. Not burned.
Understood.
Every lash of absence met its opposite presence. Every void met its measure fullness. Every attempt to erase met the rational principle that says nothing can be erased without leaving a trace.
The trace was Basil.
Nero staggered first time violet corona around his eyes flickering.
Nero: What… is this? I understood then, had already given me the answer I'd been searching for, the answer my heart needed to find. he'd told me outside Mr. Eros office, the night we'd asked him about doing the play. I smiled softly, and he returned my affection with a slight squeeze of my hand. Maybe, I am just hallucinating.
Basil opened his eyes.
They weren't red-blue anymore.
They were clear.
Pure.
The color of understanding that cuts deeper than any blade.
Basil: That is to say that you thought absence was the end. But absence needs presence to exist. Nothing needs something to define it. You are the dark between heartbeats? IT is an eternal phenomenon: the insatiate will can always, by means of an illusion spread over things, detain its creatures in life and compel them to live on. That is to say that you may be forgetting what I actually do it. In that way, everything seems to be forgotten One is chained by the Socratic love of knowledge and the delusion of being able thereby to heal the eternal wound of existence; another is ensnared by art's seductive veil of beauty fluttering before his eyes; still another by the metaphysical comfort that beneath the flux of phenomena eternal life flows on indestructibly: to say nothing of the more ordinary and almost more powerful illusions which the will has always at hand.
These three planes of illusion are on the whole designed only for the more nobly formed natures, who in general feel profoundly the weight and burden of existence, and must be deluded by exquisite stimulants into forgetfulness of their sorrow. Then I am the heartbeat. You are the silence after the scream? Then I am the scream that refuses to fade. Logos isn't light against dark. It's the tension that holds both. And right now… that tension is wrapped around your throat.
He stepped forward.
One step.
The ground didn't crack.
It harmonized.
Grass straightened. Scorched patches regrew in perfect spiralsgolden ratio curling through ash like life remembering its shape.
Nero swungclaws raking for Basil's chest.
They never landed.
The air between them sanglow, resonant, the sound of a lyre string pulled taut between opposites.
Nero's arm froze mid-swing.
Not bound.
Understood.
His own shadows turned inward coiling around his limbs like chains forged from his own absence.
Nero snarled violet ichor dripping from lips.
Nero: You cannot erase me. I am the nothing that eats everything!
Basil closed the distance.
Hand pressed flat to Nero's chestright over where a heart should beat but didn't.
Basil: I don't erase. That is to say that I unify. I bind. I make opposites fuck until they can't tell where one ends and the other begins. They are now informing me that not only are they better than the powerful, the masters of the world whose spittle they have to lick (not from fear, not at all from fear! but because God orders them to honour those in authority) – not only are they better, but they have a "better time", or at least will have a better time one day. But enough! enough! I can't bear it any longer. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where ideals are fabricated – it seems to me just to stink of lies. That is to say that you have forgotten what I may see the way I can become it. In that way, I can be something extremely useful. Your nothing needs my something. Your absence needs my presence. And right now… you are going to feel what happens when nothing gets fucked by everything.
The black star-sun flared oncebrighter than the floodlights.
Logos poured through Basil's palm.
Not destruction.
Resolution.
Nero's midnight skin crackednot breaking, harmonizing. Violet corona flickered then steadied into soft lavender glow. Shadows recoilednot fleeing, surrendering curling around Basil's wrist like lovers accepting defeat.
Nero dropped to one knee.
Wings folded.
Head bowed.
Not dead.
Not erased.
Understood.
Nero: …What have you done? I feel like that now: tired of the Me I've always been, tired of making the same mistakes, repetitively stumbling after the same small ego strokes, being caught in the same loops of anxiety and defensiveness. Maybe, this should be an anomaly.
Basil stepped back.
Eyes fading back to red-blue.
Breath steady.
Basil: That is to say that I gave you the one thing Oblivion-Eros never could context. You're not nothing anymore. To have what you have never had, you have to do what you have never done. You're the nothing that knows it needs something. Go back to your ancient god.
You know that feeling at the end of the day, when the anxiety of that-which-I-must-do falls away and, for maybe the first time that day, you see, with some clarity, the people you love and the ways you have, during that day, slightly ignored them, turned away from them to get back to what you were doing, blurted out some mildly hurtful thing, projected, instead of the deep love you really feel, a surge of defensiveness or self-protection or suspicion? That moment when you think, Oh God, Tell him the logos-child says hello. And tell him if he wants my lust… he'll have to come get it himself.
Nero rose slow, trembling.
Shadows wrapped him like a cloak gentler now.
He looked at Basil not with hate.
With recognition.
Nero: You did not defeat me. You… married me to existence.
A single wing brushed Basil's cheek cold, almost tender.
Then the tear in the sky reopened.
Nero stepped through.
Gone.
The field went quiet.
Grass regrew.
Floodlights buzzed.
Basil stood alone.
Chest heaving.
Black star-sun dimming to soft glow.
He laughed short, raw.
Basil: Hahaha… even darkness wants to be fucked into meaning.
He picked up his torn shirt.
Walked toward the gates.
Toward Kyoto.
Toward the shrine that waited with open arms and jealous tails.
O my sorrow so big it finally taught nothing how to want.
The night exhaled.
And somewhere in the black between stars, Oblivion-Eros felt the first real tremor of hunger that wasn't its own.
Yeah, it was me: the singular man.