A rage of broken fire
marked another margin,
a shudder where time’s stride faltered,
but it moved without question,
drawn by a calling older than light,
its past dissolving into the murmur of particles.

The living hush gave way to a silence unimagined.
There the traveler was refined,
its subject thinned to a single point of reference.

What lay beyond was neither death nor light,
but a vastness that received without gaze,
a sanctum emptied of shape,
where being itself became the only prayer.

It slipped beyond the reach of systems,
its course absorbed into the unlit gulf.
No measure, no centre.
Only the suspension of all relation.

The void does not speak.
It does not welcome.
It persists as absence persists.

And yet,
in this extinction of contour
there is a clarity,
a solitude stripped of self,
where peace is not felt,
but is.
Indistinguishable from the dark.