Tragic Enemy

One of the best story tropes is when the protagonist pulls back the curtain on their nemesis.

Spending years chasing behind them, only for them to seem so small and shattered at the ending. Before the eclipse.

Seeing someone that had everything you’ve been fighting for all your life, now wilted, surely snaps something inside you too. When you walk up the steps to take your medal, you can’t help but begin to see it as a void. On top of the world, but the stars are all blotted now.

Did you actually get your position, or was it the erosion which carried you? And even in this grand tower looking down, the ashes flail about, the ashes smear the wood; inheriting an empire of dirt.

Why now miss someone who you so desperately wanted gone? It’s mourning the last stronghold against the wasteland you find yourself in.

People talk a world without heroes, but a world without mortal enemies is far more terrifying for those so industriously inclined. Definitions start to melt but one shall push ahead. Hoping not to dissolve. Away from the newly minted phantom, some shrunken form, haunting each step. Desert spanning for miles, ruins upon the hill; maybe it is time to become the villain.

A trope that transfigures the baseline of man against man into man against the divine, the very system he’s suspended in, how much Nature demands of him, how those below won’t understand, climbing for your now crumbled position and crown: the melt of time casted upon and waiting while fifth-dimensional entities peruse, indifferently.

A nemesis was so tangible. In this feudal wake you only have the horizon spanning infinitely, of an amber haze. Fighting against a mind deteriorating.

Do you think you can survive in this new wasteland?

Well, you don’t have a choice.

You’re already here.

Become someone’s nemesis, maybe.