The clash in the chapel represented an impasse of determination. Flavio's resolve was like a glacier, gradual, vast and frigid. Devon's resistance resembled a crack in stone, minor yet relentless. They separated without aggression yet with a shared comprehension. The conflict wouldn't be settled through dialogue, in a stone chamber. Its outcome would be decided on the battlefield of the Conjunction.
Devon's journey took him again to Paris returning to the ossuary's profound resonance. He bore Flavio's mournful judgment: "You will remain at the brink and observe the tide rolling in. Your defiance will be the exquisite hopeless act, before the silence."
He wasn't ready, for what awaited him inside the chamber marked with the gridded symbol.
Alistair Croft was there.
He positioned himself cross-legged at the heart of the luminous pattern facing away from the doorway. He wasn't restrained. His familiar tweed jacket, now coated with the dust of the catacombs was, on him. In front of him arranged with precision lay his notepad and aged fountain pen. Fronie Felicity remained at a distance a quiet observer, her hands of the ritualist motionless.
"Croft!" Devon's shout rang out within the bony chamber.
The elderly don slowly swiveled his head. His expression was calm the traces of nervous watchfulness erased. He appeared not frozen. Determined. "Ah Duncan. Excellent. I anticipated your arrival. Having a witness is crucial, for the lemma."
"Leave that place immediately." Devon stepped ahead. Fronie didn't stop him. She simply stood by as though witnessing an event.
"No " Croft replied, his voice gentle yet unwavering. It was the manner he had employed for years to resolve academic disputes. "I have finalized my analysis of the data. Flavio's theory is… valid. The Lethargic Calculus is not heretical. It represents the culmination of a proof I have grappled with throughout my life." He raised his notepad. At the top of the page beneath his Q.E.D. " he had inscribed a solitary sentence, in his trembling handwriting: Corollary: The alert mind, once fully understood opts for its calmness.
"This isn't selecting, Alistair! This is him triumphing!" Devon urged, crouching beside the emblem sensing its exhausting vibration.
"Winning?" Croft grinned, a weary grin. "This isn't a competition. It's a realization. For six decades I sketched lines to resist the curve. I was a man attempting to block the sea with toothpicks. Now I understand that the sea isn't my foe. It is merely… the sea. Ceasing to battle it is not surrender. It is returning home."
He set the notepad aside the note in a lifelong record. "Flavio gave me what my own efforts never managed: a conclusion, to the battle. My watchfulness was a kind of pain. A deliberate pain, indeed. Pain all the same. I have decided to step down."
"Croft, please. Your work, your students… Javier…"
"Javier might get it.. He might not. It no longer matters to me." He shut his eyes. Drew a long slow breath. "The clamor… of thinking… is overwhelmingly loud. I'm going to tune into silence. For real."
He didn't sag. He didn't fall apart. He just… rested. The soft ebb and flow of his breathing persisted,. The sharp concentrated vigor that defined Alistair Croft—the inquisitiveness, the dread, the rebellious intellect—drained into the tiled ground. He transformed into a center within the quiet room an ideal element, to its carefully maintained quietness. He hadn't been captured. He had joined.
Devon gazed, a scream caught in his throat. This was the terror. Not the forceful seizure of a will. Its willing logical submission. His final genuine partner in grasping the foe had just turned into a display, in its gallery.
Fronie Felicity advanced, not intending to intimidate Devon but to appreciate her effort. "A smooth shift. The intellect embracing its refined ending."
Fury, fierce and frantic ignited within Devon. Of aiming for Fronie he lunged toward the notepad. He grabbed it ripping off the sheet. He sought to annihilate the corollary to incinerate the evidence.
However the words had been inscribed already. In ink. In the calm that rested on Croft's expression.
The emblem's light flickered rhythmically aligning with the off rhythms, from Glen Lyon and the Silent Forest. The Grand Conjunction was near. The circuit was preparing, now infused with Croft's yielded intellect contributing to the energy.
Devon glanced between the scholar and the content ritualist. He had been defeated. At the core of the adversary's powerful claim he had lost the individual most familiar, with the argument.
He made no effort to remove Croft. The don's body was an unoccupied chapel. The belief was gone.
Grasping the ripped page of the notepad Devon spun around. Dashed out of the room the noise of his sprinting footsteps a desperate dimming curse, against the vast and swelling silence. He escaped not from a battle. From a burial he arrived too late to prevent.. He understood, with a cold certainty seeping into his veins that the silence had ceased to approach.
It was here.