The chamber was dim, its air thick with wax and parchment. Candles guttered in iron sconces, their flames reduced to low, restless tongues that painted jagged shadows across the walls. The map on the table lay open like a wound, its surface crowded with lines, arrows, and sigils inked by a precise but unrelenting hand.
Logos sat hunched over it, elbows braced on either side, his eyes dark and fathomless. He had arranged everything: the crawler patterns, the supply routes, the kill-zones, the timing of the walls' reinforcements. His plan was complete. All he could do now was wait for the storm to come.
Yet his mind refused stillness.
His fingers drummed against the table in a steady, rhythmic tick. Not nerves—he did not do nerves—but an irritation, a splinter in thought. Something out of place.
Lucy.
Her words, her gestures, her silences—they had shifted. Subtly, but persistently. Logos, who discerned order in chaos with the clarity of a hawk, who saw battlefields as boards and cities as hives, found her increasingly opaque. The noise would not resolve into pattern.
He had first dismissed it as exhaustion. The endless watchfulness, the ceaseless burden of command, the cruel repetition of crawler assaults—it wore down even the strongest. But fatigue had a signature: sloppiness, hesitation, errors creeping into the margins. Lucy showed none. Her counsel remained sharp, her posture unyielding, her hands steady.
So not exhaustion.
Then war-anxiety. The fortress stank of it—soldiers with trembling hands, sleepless eyes, muttered prayers. A rational hypothesis, but the evidence failed again. Lucy did not shake, did not curse the Crawlers, did not falter in voice or will. Even when the trenches ran red, her command held.
So not anxiety.
Logos leaned back, eyes half-closed, replaying her in his memory. He catalogued her as though she were a campaign:
—Her gaze, lingering longer than before, as though searching.
—Her silences, swelling like tides, filled not with words unspoken in sharpness but in… hesitation.
—Her grip, weeks ago, when she caught his wrist. The faint tremor. Quickly hidden.
A non-random change. Consistent. Escalating.
"Something else," Logos murmured. His voice carried oddly in the chamber, a resonance deeper than human.
He seized a quill and scrawled in the margin of the map, building a framework. Exhaustion: 0.12 probability. War-anxiety: 0.05. Unknown factor: unresolved. A missing variable.
He hated missing variables.
A war could be solved with logistics. A philosophy with axioms. Even human vice could be predicted—greed, fear, ambition, these were constants, exploitable like weather. But this? This slipped the grasp of calculation.
His jaw clenched. He rose abruptly and began pacing, boots soundless on the worn rug.
He recalled her face when he had told her, "Evil is not my nature." The way her eyes had widened—not with disbelief, not with anger, but with something he could not categorize. Relief? Pain? Both?
He recalled the mark carved into the wall—one of many she had etched to track his growth. He walked to it now, fingers brushing the notches. The most recent was from over a year ago. She had stopped.
Lucy never forgot. Memory was her sharpest blade. If she had ceased, it was by choice.
Why?
He pressed his fingertips harder into the wood, as though he could force the truth from it. "You are changing, Mother. I cannot read you."
The words hung heavy.
He returned to the table, staring down at the scattered symbols. His mind raced through possibilities. Regret? Doubt? These left traces—hesitations in counsel, avoidance of decisions. She had shown none. Unless… it was not the world she doubted. It was him.
The thought froze him mid-breath.
Could it be that she, who had never flinched at his voice, his eyes, his altered essence—had finally recoiled? Others did. They whispered, they stared, they avoided his gaze as if it scalded them. But Lucy had been constant. Always saying: "You are my son." Always assuring.
If that constancy was breaking—why now?
He replayed every interaction. Her silences. Her searching looks. Her refusal to carve the latest mark. All pointed inward, toward him.
A sour weight coiled in his chest, unfamiliar and unwelcome. Fear? No. Not fear. Frustration. That he could not solve her.
He shut his eyes, summoning the old lessons. Years ago, Lucy teaching him the value of restraint—not because it achieved results, but because it preserved something unseen, something she called nature. He had accepted it as a principle, just as one accepts the rule of gravity: invisible, but absolute.
And now—she, the teacher of that law—was shifting, unraveling before him.
He opened his eyes again. The candles had burned lower, dripping wax like pale blood down their stands. The map swam with lines that no longer mattered.
"Mother, what burden do you carry that I cannot see?" he whispered.
For the first time in years, silence answered him. Silence, and the faint hiss of candle-flame.
His mind, unwilling to stop, offered another possibility: perhaps she planned to leave.
The thought stabbed him. Cold, precise, logical. She had stayed through the Crawlers, through war and ruin, always at his side. But what if now—now of all times—she sought escape?
"No," he said aloud, shaking his head. The logic frayed at once. If the Crawlers had not driven her away, nothing else could. "That is idiotic."
Still, the doubt lingered like smoke.
He sank into the chair, quill tapping again against the table. Without the missing variable, no solution could be derived. It left him unmoored. And Logos loathed being unmoored.
"This is exhausting," he muttered, though he did not feel fatigue in the way others did. It was the exhaustion of chasing a shadow across an endless plain.
For now, he resolved, he would wait. Observe. Watch the anomaly until it revealed itself. It had to. Every pattern, given time, resolved.
But as he stared at the dying flame, he knew this truth as well: battles could be won with tactics. Cities rebuilt with logic. But Lucy—her silence, her sorrow—was a battle unlike any other. One he did not yet know how to fight.
And for Logos, that ignorance was intolerable.