Lukas's heart was doing something it had no business doing in a freezing cavern surrounded by bone powder and undead wind.
It was thundering. Wild and untamed — the specific, uncontrolled rhythm of a muscle that has received news it wasn't prepared for and is responding with the honest, unfiltered urgency of something that hasn't learned to be composed about things that matter.
He was chosen by someone.
The thought sat in the center of his awareness and refused to be moved past.
He had built his entire sense of himself — slowly, carefully, across years of evidence that had accumulated with the patient consistency of water wearing stone — around a specific and well-supported conclusion. He was a failure. Not dramatically. Not in the spectacular, narrative way that failures sometimes presented themselves, with the consolation of at least being interesting. Quietly. Thoroughly. The kind of failure that doesn't generate stories because nothing worth telling happens around it.
