The image settled.
At first, Alex thought the lens had failed to resolve. The darkness was too uniform, too deliberate to be void. He adjusted his stance, leaning closer, then slightly to the side.
The field of view shifted.
Depth asserted itself.
What filled the aperture was not a wall. Not stone. Not sky as he understood it. A vast presence occupied the frame, distant and immense, its surface burning with a pale intensity that did not flicker or pulse. Light radiated from it evenly, without warmth or glare, as if illumination itself had been flattened into a single state.
And before it—
Something intruded.
A perfect occlusion cut across the light, a curved absence interrupting the whole. The edge was too clean. Too precise. It did not bleed or scatter. It simply was positioned with exacting finality..
No corona bled around its edge. No distortion marked the boundary between light and shadow. The overlap was total, absolute, as if the two had been designed to meet this way.
Alex shifted again.
The perspective changed. The scale adjusted. The distance reasserted itself.
The image remained identical.
The occlusion did not advance. It did not recede. The light behind it did not strain or dim. The configuration held, flawless and unmoving, regardless of angle or proximity.
Time did not announce itself.
Alex watched longer than he meant to.
There was no sense of arrival. No implication of aftermath. The moment did not feel interrupted—it felt preserved. A state held intact against whatever should have followed.
He became aware of his own breathing only when it disrupted the silence.
A truth fixed in place, stripped of before and after. The kind of image that did not ask to be understood, only acknowledged.
Alex straightened slowly.
The telescope did not resist as he stepped back. The lens retained its alignment, the seal unbroken. Nothing urged him to adjust further. Nothing suggested incompletion.
He looked once more.
The eclipse remained.
— — —
Alex turned away.
He took three steps before stopping.
Not because the telescope called to him.
Because something lingered.
He looked back.
The eclipse remained unchanged. The occlusion still cut the light with perfect curvature, the overlap exact, unmoving. No drift. No distortion.
But the light behind it—
He frowned.
It was subtle. Not dimmer. Not brighter.
Offset.
The surface no longer felt uniform. The illumination held, but the texture beneath it had shifted by a degree too small to measure. Not movement. Not progression.
A discrepancy.
Alex adjusted his position, leaning left.
The framing changed.
The eclipse did not.
The offset persisted.
He stepped back again. Farther this time. The distance compressed, then reasserted. The presence remained immense, remote, intact.
The flaw did not disappear.
Alex waited for discomfort to follow.
It didn't.
Whatever the inconsistency was, it did not destabilize the image. It did not demand correction. It simply existed, quiet and nonintrusive, like an imperfection sealed beneath glass.
Acceptable.
Alex exhaled and turned away again, this time without stopping.
Behind him, the telescope remained aligned.
The seal held.
— — —