The Wound

The light is already fading. Every brilliance – scattering into the dark. But beneath the light, something else was gathering. Mass. The silent weight you built while you burnt. You didn't notice it gathering. Neither did they. Light is what they saw. Mass is what remains – the pull that persists after your fire dies. You will not hear the travelers who feel your gravity and cannot name it. You may never know if you bent anything at all. The dead star's only law: what you gathered in silence outlives everything you burnt to show.

The Path

You want the monument – the name outlasting the body. But monuments are what the living walk past, and the dead ignore. When the fire dies, the core collapses. What you built in silence becomes the only thing left: a curve in spacetime. Travelers will pass through your gravity and feel the pull – an unexplained deflection, a tug they cannot name. They will correct course without knowing why. You become a mystery in their equations. An anomaly they call law. Your name – first to go. The true architects of history are invisible – their mass felt, not seen. You will never know if you left weight behind. That is the price.

The Shadow

He demands every kindness be witnessed, every sacrifice announced. He gave invisibly once – held something together for years – and at the end, someone else took the bow. He stood in the wings and watched. So now he trades the enduring pull of gravity for the temporary glare of attention. People orbit his performance but never land. They remember the show, not the mass. He dies having been seen by everyone and known by no one. Or the soul is hollowed by a voice that arrived before memory – too much, too loud, who do you think you are? He never trusted his own mass. A voice arrived before memory, too much, too loud, who do you think you are?, and he believed it. He saw confident men claim legacies they had not earned, and swore against becoming them. He could not tell earned weight from borrowed. He enters rooms already apologising. His shoulders curve before anyone speaks – a flinch against a blow that stopped falling decades ago. He has something to say. He can feel it pressing against his teeth. But the voice is older than his teeth, older than his voice, and it speaks first: Who asked you? He shrinks from every room, then lingers at the threshold, hoping someone would turn and say stay. No one turns. They did not feel him enter; they do not feel him leave. He dies having exerted no pull. The orbits that should have bent around him continue straight – paths that will never know they were meant to curve.

The Cut