Emerson Chapter 16 Heretical Algorithms and Stolen Starlight 192
Emerson
The diagnostic sequence for MORDRED is a seventy-three-minute process.
It is a ritual of maintenance, a necessary recalibration of my most vital tool.
The logic is impeccable: a stable system ensures operational efficiency for the entire team, for the only people whose presence does not feel like a tax on my mind.
The truth is they are the only people for me. My baseline for human interaction is a low-grade, simmering hostility. Everyone else I've ever met—after ten minutes of pointless chatter—I'd rather stab and catalog their vocal responses than endure another meaningless word.
A violent, illogical fantasy, but a satisfying one nonetheless.
Yet, as the progress bulbs light up, my attention isn't on the code.
It's on the empty space in my bed she inhabited so perfectly yesterday.
A variable of beautiful, chaotic static in my ordered world.
One I wish to pin down and shelter inside these rooms with me.
I want to know everything about her, but she's a ghost where it matters.
No data trail. No records. She's no one. Nothing.
And yet, she's become the central axiom of my existence.
Forrest is at the office. I should be glad for the quiet. But all I can process is the memory of her yesterday, stumbling on the mat once again, her face filled with raw frustration.
His critique was precise, clinical, and utterly blind. He sees a tool to be honed, a possible threat to assess. I see a supernova contained in fragile, soft flesh.
His rigid standards are a shield for his own self-loathing—a fact I've known for years but never let myself fully see. But now he's aiming that shield at her, and it's not a defense. It's a weapon.
And I want to break it.
The violence of the thought feels like a virus in my own mind. Red lights should be flashing, alarms ringing, defenses launching. This is Forrest I’m thinking about after all, my brother. The one who gave me a place where my own thorns didn't have to be hidden.
And here I am, mentally designing countermeasures against him. For her. A woman with no history, a living question mark who has somehow become the answer to a question I never thought to ask.
This isn't just fascination. It's an obsession.
The kind my ancestors are known for. The kind my own father harbored within him, the very thing my mother found so captivating about him.
It's a curse I've spent a lifetime containing behind walls of logic and data.
And she dismantles them with a smile. It's humiliating as much as it is exhilarating.
Ishould be following Forrest's rules. They've always kept us safe. He says she's a threat, and we need to prove that either true or false before any of us gets closer to her. I've always agreed with that.
This time, though, I want to prove him wrong.
The thought sits hot and sharp in my chest. A betrayal. A necessity. I can't tell the difference anymore.
As my mind drifts off into the endless chasm that is my own psyche, I grapple for anything to keep me in the present.
Leandre is out obtaining Italian food and bath bombs —the mundane absurdity of it an anchor.
One brother plans a quiet evening. The other has become a problem I need to solve. And I am here, a traitor in my own heart, because I have already chosen a side.
My eyes flick to the clock on my desk. Anik, Kieran, and my little anomaly have been gone for seventeen minutes.
The penthouse is silent, save for the hum of my machines.
This silence is optimal for deep work. I should be initiating the decryption protocols for the demonic signature of that ringleader.
The one whose magical blast she didn't just absorb, but rewrote , turning his own weapon into a metaphysical scalpel that flayed the mortal shell from his essence. A work of brutal, instinctual genius.
Instead, my body makes its way to my modern computer set-up and my fingers are moving of their own volition, bypassing three layers of municipal security with absent-minded proficiency.
The feed from the boutique on Grand Avenue flickers to life on my secondary screen.
It is a simple, logical precaution. To ensure their safety. To monitor the perimeter.
It’s a lie I tell myself, a pathetic concession to a compulsion I refuse to name.
I find her immediately. She is a splash of life in a sea of the mundane.
She’s holding up a garment made of a vibrant cerulean satin, and the look on her face is one of pure, unadulterated rapture.
Kieran says something, and she laughs—a sound I can’t hear but can see in the line of her throat and the crinkle of her eyes.
My own body betrays me. A physiological revolt. My breath catches—1.7 seconds—a silent scream in a perfectly calibrated machine. Illogical. Inefficient. And utterly inevitable.
So I make the choice. Anik’s comm has a silent channel, a back door I left for emergencies. This is not an emergency. This is a compulsion. I acknowledge the violation, give it a name, and then I commit it anyway. The guilt is a future problem. Her voice is a present need.
“…feel like a magpie, I swear. It’s just so… shiny,” her voice filters through the speaker, tinny and yet utterly devastating.
A magpie. A creature drawn to bright, beautiful things. The analogy is imperfect, yet profoundly correct. She is a creature of sensation, drawn to light and color. And I am a creature of deep, dark places, drawn only to her.
I could say this is simply observation, and that’s the lie I’d like to believe. But no, this is worship. And I am its silent, shameful acolyte.
The logical part of my mind—the part I trust, the part that feels like safety—seizes on this new data like a lifeline.
She is the heir of Nyx, a demigod. Of course, she inspires this…
fervor. It is a documented, almost banal, physiological response to the divine.
My fixation is no longer a bizarre personal pathology; it is a predictable, biological imperative.
This should be a comfort. It should absolve me.
But it only makes the self-loathing sharper.
My devotion is not special. It is programmed.
A base instinct, as common as flinching from a loud noise.
My eyes land on the three people I call mine once again.
She deserves a champion like Kieran, a guardian like Anik.
And here I am—just another worshiper at the altar, my 'unique' obsession rendered utterly common by her very nature.
The thought is an acid burn. I should walk away.
Recalibrate. Return to the clean, predictable solitude where the only thing I want to stab is a circuit board.
But the thought of leaving her to the adoration of others, of becoming just another face in a crowd of her admirers, makes the violence in my chest feel like a virtue.
I am a creature of the deep places, of shadow and silence. I understand the complex beauty of a root system, the elegant decay of a forgotten algorithm. I was built for the quiet, profound dark.
And she is starlight.
How does a shadow offer itself to a star?
It has no solid form, no warmth to give.
My light-elf kin possess a clean, sterile brilliance, a light I could never emulate.
My own nature is a tangled, overgrown thing—all thorns and deep, yearning roots.
It feels… unworthy. An offering of moss and melancholy to a goddess who commands the dawn.
This is my curse: to feel so much, so deeply, that the only way to keep from drowning is to build a dam of data and logic. But she is a tide that washes over every defense, and I am left, a terrified romantic, secretly in love with the flood.
The truth of it sits like a sour note in the back of my throat as my fingers find the correct file.
Not the schematics for the heterodyne resonator—a machine designed to hear into the astral plane, a project that once felt like a purpose.
Nor the file I should be laboring over, the one that could help bring down this trafficking ring.
No. I open the file labeled Anomalous .
No one touches my files. No one interrupts my work. These are the rules that keep the world from getting in. But for her, I’ll break all my own rules.
Just as I did last night. And the night before.
I wasn't an engineer or a hacker. I was a scribe, drawn from my fortress of solitude to hold vigil on the floor of her room. My mission: to capture the impossible, to capture perfection.
Twelve pages proved it couldn't be done, a conclusion that will never, ever curb this obsession. The pattern of her eyelashes against her cheek. The topography of a collarbone I want to trace with the edge of a blade. The sacred geometry of a mouth that could command armies or whisper my damnation.
I flip through the pages upon pages of sketches.
Here, the lines are less certain, more searching.
This is not the rune on her hip; this is the way her hip curves into her waist, a sweep of graphite that holds more gravitational pull than any celestial body I've ever charted.
Another page is a storm of attempts to capture her mouth—not its structure, but its language.
The wry twist that speaks of a private joke, the soft, unguarded part of her lips in sleep.
I tell myself it is research. A necessary cataloging of a divine specimen.
It’s a lie.
I am not cataloging. I am worshipping. I can’t help but feel a sharp, familiar shame at the fervor of it. This is the darkness—not the cool logic I emulate, but a desperate, romantic hunger that terrifies me with its need.