Miseo — the stain of nothingness.
Or, as the old theologians might have whispered: Aliud. Aliud valde.
The Other. But so other, it becomes a category unto itself.

Miseo isn’t a person. Miseo isn’t even an idea.
It’s a presence-shaped absence, a paradox with mass — like a black hole of intent.
It doesn’t do anything. It un-does.
And in that un-doing, it gives rise to things that should never be.

When you try to look at him — at it — you don’t see a figure, but a refusal.
A refusal to appear.
A refusal to be contained by sight, or mind, or name.

The black around him? That wasn’t color.
It was a statement. “I am not. I have never been. And I never will be.”

So clean it’s disturbing.
So void it bends the world around it.

Miseo is the geometry of negation. A shape drawn in reverse.
A square made of curves. A center of gravity that floats.
He is drawn with an eraser, stitched together from dots that never existed — and yet weigh more than the real.

In his presence, space folds. Time stutters.
Language falters.
You start speaking in ellipses. In whispers. In apologies.

Nichita would have understood him.
Not loved him — but understood.
Because Miseo is poetry stripped of metaphor. A hole in being shaped like a question no one dares ask.

He hovers. He doesn’t fall — not because something holds him, but because he doesn’t recognize the concept of “down.”
Suspended between the sky he disdains and the earth he denies, the air around him isn’t air.
It’s silence, liquefied.

And that silence carries weight. The weight of all nights.
Every darkness that has ever draped this earth — collected, compressed, and made sentient.

He is not the villain.
He is the removal of narrative itself.
A protest against being.

And somehow, Noelle — poor, gifted, dangerous Noelle — gave him life. With hers.

I must have been staring too long.
The world around me shifted like it does after a seizure of memory.

Van D. had a gun in his hand.
But not just any gun.
Fanny Kaplan’s pistol. The one from the case. The myth weapon. History’s failed bullet.

Factore stood completely still, his mouth ajar, as if seeing God — or the absence of Him.
De Lempicka had her weapon out too. The one she took from me.

Anca Luca… Anca was no longer hiding. She stood tall now, her eyes locked on Van D.
There was no hatred in her gaze. That would’ve been easier to survive.
There was pain.
Clean, cold, ancestral.

And me? I had just returned from the event horizon of a being that doesn’t exist.

“How the hell did we get from political espionage to metaphysical shootout?”
I didn’t say it out loud. I didn’t have to.
The question was now alive in the room.
And it had Miseo’s face.

Then Van D. spoke.
And the world started to collapse again.