Once, in a Timeless Noon

In the beginning, or perhaps at the end of time, there were three sisters, three primal forces from which the fabric of being was woven.

The eldest was named Whiteness. She was born in the blinding flash of a supernova and in the first cry of a newborn. Every step she took was a triumphal march, every word an indisputable truth, every glance a blessing. She was the ecstasy of victory, the purity of the first snow, the clarity of a brilliant thought. But her light was so bright it burned the eyes, and her volume so loud it deafened, forcing the world to forget the shades in between.

The youngest was named Blackness. She lurked in the bottomless silence of the cosmos between the stars and in the last breath of the dying. Her whisper birthed hurricanes, her tears were acid rain, and her embrace was a maelstrom. She was the bittersweetness of tragedy, the mesmerizing beauty of a perfect storm, the catharsis of total collapse. Her arrival was always an event—frightening, but unforgettable.

And between them was Grayness.

She was not a compromise, not a mixture of white and black. She was a phenomenon unto herself. Grayness was the dust on a forgotten book, the hum of fluorescent lights in an empty building, the taste of cold tea. Her presence was not an addition, but a subtraction. She was absolute indifference, the vacuum in which all emotional response freezes; not merely unremarkable—she was faceless. In her presence, the most vibrant paintings became mere canvas and paint, the greatest symphonies a sequence of soundwaves, and fervent declarations of love the contraction of facial muscles.

The world remembered the triumphs of Whiteness and admired the grand failures of Blackness. They were praised in epics and chronicles. Grayness, however, was not granted even a footnote. She was eternal and stable, the foundation to which all things returned after the bright flashes and thunderous falls. But it was this eternity in oblivion that was her personal hell.

And one day, in a timeless noon, when nothing heralded either unexpected joy or inevitable sorrow, Grayness made a decision. She would not simply become bright. She would make the world see that true brilliance lies in perfect dullness. That true brightness is nothing other than the all-consuming, final Grayness.

Her revenge began imperceptibly.

First, people stopped crying at funerals. They performed the rituals, spoke the words, but the aching sense of loss, the black velvet of grief that gave death its weight, thinned into a gray, formal procedure. Then, people stopped feeling elation. An athlete who broke a world record stood on the podium and saw only numbers on the board, but did not feel the wave of all-consuming triumph. Lovers looked at one another and saw only a collection of biological traits, unable to perceive the infinite palette that sets a soul ablaze and turns a simple person into an entire universe.

Whiteness and Blackness were the first to sense that something was wrong.

Whiteness orchestrated the grandest festival of light the world had ever seen. Billions of suns flared in her honor; galaxies wove themselves into a dance. But mortals on Earth merely raised their heads, noted an "unusual atmospheric phenomenon," and returned to their affairs. Her light no longer blinded. It had become mere background.

In desperation, Blackness unleashed the most devastating catastrophe upon the world—a financial collapse meant to plunge civilization into chaos. But there was no panic, no riots. People stared silently at their zeroed-out accounts, shrugged, and went to jobs that no longer brought them money or satisfaction. Her darkness no longer frightened. It had become a mere inconvenience.

The sisters, their strength fading, found Grayness on a vast asphalt plateau under a low-hanging sky of solid clouds. She sat on a concrete cube, and for the first time, she was not invisible. Her form, woven from colorless threads, now seemed the only real thing in this fading world.

"What have you done?" whispered Whiteness, her radiance barely flickering like a dying candle. "You are destroying everything," hissed Blackness, her shadows grown pale and transparent.

Grayness slowly raised her head. Her face, if one could call it that, was a mask of complete and eternal indifference. There was nothing in her eyes—no malice, no joy. Only a boundless, calm emptiness.

"On the contrary," she replied in a flat, colorless voice. "I am destroying nothing. I am returning everything to its true state. You two are merely anomalies, temporary deviations from the norm. You are noise. I am silence. You are the world's fever, its rising and falling temperatures. And I am its normal, stable state. You made the world feel, suffer, and rejoice. And I, I grant it freedom. Freedom from feeling. Peace from meaning."

She stood, and the world took a final, barely perceptible breath. The landscape lost what remained of its perspective and depth, transforming into a flat, gray canvas.

"You wanted me to be noticed?" Grayness almost smiled for the first time in an eternity. "Now, you will see only me. You will become me."

Whiteness and Blackness watched in horror as their own forms began to dull, to lose their contours, dissolving into the encroaching nothingness. They tried to scream—one in ecstasy, the other in terror, as they always had.

But not a sound escaped their lips.

The world no longer remembered pain or happiness. It had reached the absolute equilibrium, the perfect order of which Grayness had dreamed. She had won. She had become everything.

And then the world, deprived of both pain and rapture, simply ceased to notice... itself.