The eternal clash against the forces of light and darkness, a tale rewritten a thousand times to accommodate the story to the local standards or the legends of a timeline. And despite all its versions the plot line was still the same, somehow following the same pattern due to a special influence.

In the end, the light always overcome the darkness no matter the difference in power.

However, this truth didn’t always stand. Sometimes, fate would make this seemingly unshakable statement crumble on its foundations, leading the story toward an end we neither expected nor wished for.

Sometimes, the heroes cannot win. Sometimes, they aren’t heroes at all.

Some share with others that light will always prevail, while another mindset would flaunt that darkness exists because the light shines. Nobody would waste their time minding the ethics and morals while they were thinking about such lines, fixating their view on the old and solid philosophy of the two-sided coin to easily explain a confrontation too ancient to be explained.

Yet, the truth worked in another way: darkness doesn’t need light to exist, nor light requires the presence of darkness to be bright. A world covered in obscurity can exist, and the same could be said about a world with no dim place.

But, as both can exist with the presence of the other, they also cannot cohabit at all. The light cannot be sombre, and darkness cannot illuminate anything. Instead, a sort of correlation is born at the place they meet, creating an abomination in the name of equilibrium to sustain a battleground in the form of a condition desired by neither side.

A shadow, too bright to be part of darkness, too shallow to be part of light.

The mixture ends up wasted, unusable and hated by both, thrown into the fires which keep igniting the sparks of this eternal rivalry. A duel taking the aspect of dread and irritation inside the heart of their children, a never-ending war between the forces of light and darkness.

The lesson can go on, running on this skinny and improper thread for who knows how many centuries before people get bored of this swinging duality.

They do and do, accepting this occurrence like a naturel phenomenon which cannot be denied while sticking to their principles and new-born teachings to try and elevate themselves to a so-called higher degree of consciousness.

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In the end, the phenomenon always occurs, and people can only watch it unfold before their shackled, powerless self.

The war began.

Mortal shells on one side, clamouring with rage and courage as they presented their weapons of steel and fire to the Day goddess before receiving the charge from the unyielding foe; beasts and folks of unimaginable origins and misconstructed shapes.

Rain poured on their sorry body, dismantled cadavers trampled upon by the survivors who stood to fight with the will to see the finale act. Shields clashed against teeth and claws, but the fire-lance was always true to its lethality and managed to slay the incomprehensible creature with devious and hungry eyes.

The men roared against the thing which came from the other side, sorcerers poured cataclysmic spells on the titans of darkness as they threatened to swallow the field inside their depthless silhouette.

And as the day grew old while the night turned shabby, this battle decisively marked history.

Darkness lost its hold, and half of the world now resided in the hands of the light. The stalemate persisted through the following years, until it became decades, a millennia before finally taking its final form: the present reality.

Nowadays, the day cycles are explained through the myth of the ancient war: the light running after the decaying darkness, and darkness consuming the unguarded light. Many seasons passed, and this truth remained despite its confusing wording. A state of the world as everybody knew it, natural, maybe obvious, but clear to this world’s residents.

In the eyes of human civilisation, the war was over. But peace left them with a sour aftertaste like an incomplete achievement, a victory which felt unsatisfactory, empty of reason or purpose. So they tried and rose again, succeeding in tasks that were given by no one, a selfish assignment in order to enjoy a self-proclaimed fulfilment.

Nowadays, despite the myth still holding some truth, its meaning was forsaken and its origin buried under the dust of time. However, and fortunately, there were still two people keeping this memory intact for they were both the eternal rivals, this so-called two-faced coin.

In the struggle between the light and the darkness, there can be only one standing atop in the end. It could either be the nightmares born from ignorance, blindness and fear, or the blazing spectrum of verity, irrationality, and apathy.

But for some reasons, a dread persisted through the ages, clawing the paranoids’ mind with its flawed, existential crisis.

What if there was no end to this perpetual intrigue? And worst case scenario, what would happen if one side actually won the war?

If the consequences to losing to the darkness were already limpidly explained, the failure throwing mortals into either an eternity of suffering or an immediate and absolute closure to their story, then what about the light?

And to paint an even darker future: what were the conditions to join this war on the light’s side? What were the promised rewards once this was all over, and the price they had to pay to enjoy its protection to this day?