The room was a cage of cold light. Every surface, from the floor to the severe, angled table, was cut from the same dark, polished stone. There were no windows. Light came from the walls themselves, a sterile, blue-white glow that pulsed from the Crystalline Myxoid plates set within the rock. It was a dead light, a light that gave no warmth, and it made the air taste of ozone and recycled stillness. Lauri Vatanen sat chained to a heavy chair, the cold metal of the cuffs a constant, biting reminder of his failure. The tremors in his body had subsided to a low, persistent hum, a current of wrongness that lived in his muscles now.
Anastasya Orlova stood opposite him. The Regalis officer, her form encased in the same glowing armor she wore in the forest, held a thin, semi-translucent sheet of crystal. A Data-Slate. It was inert, dark. She had not activated it yet. Her objective was to establish a baseline, to gauge his defiance. Her contempt had not lessened since his capture; it had only been distilled into a quiet, professional focus.
— Report Silvanus patrol strengths along the eastern maze, detail your clan’s defensive Biotic Husbandry, number of active wardens, and locations of your deep groves, — she began, her voice as flat and cold as the room’s light.
Lauri said nothing. He stared at the wall behind her, at the intricate, repeating pattern etched into the stone. The Weft of Vigil. It was the symbol of the Regalis Regime, a geometric representation of an interconnected, ordered system. To him, it looked like a diagram of a prison. He thought of the living, chaotic weave of roots in his own grove, and a fresh pang of loss, sharp and undulled by nectar, cut through him. He felt for the empty Nectar Flask at his belt, a familiar, hollow weight.
— Your silence is a confession of sedition, — Anastasya stated, her tone unchanged. She was following a protocol, a script carved into the laws of the Bastion of Unwavering Vigil. — Cooperation will be noted. Resistance will be corrected.
He finally met her gaze. Her eyes were dark, patient, the eyes of something that expects to win through sheer endurance. He saw no flicker of the woman who had stiffened at a bird’s song. That was gone, buried again under layers of duty.
— Your questions are wrong. You are mapping a flood by counting the trees it has already drowned, — Lauri said, his voice a dry rasp after not having spoken for hours.
Anastasya’s expression did not change, but a subtle tension entered her shoulders. This was not in the script.
— Give me a slate, — Lauri demanded. It was not a request.
For a moment, the officer simply stared at him. A prisoner did not make demands. A savage from the forest did not know the function of a Data-Slate. Her pride, the rigid certainty of her station, was a wall between them. But behind it, the memory of her lost patrols, of reports that did not align, was a corrosive agent. To learn more, she would have to cede a fraction of control. It was a bitter price. She slid an inactive slate and a stylus across the table.
Lauri leaned forward as far as his chains would allow. He picked up the stylus, his hand shaking. The tremor was a humiliation, a physical manifestation of his weakness. He ignored it. He touched the stylus to the slate’s surface. It flickered to life, a blank field of pale blue light.
He did not draw lines. He drew flows. He ignored the neat grid of the Regalis cartographers and began to map the Verdant Maze as a living system. His hand moved with a strange, new precision, the tremor becoming a part of the motion, creating a textured, vibrant line that seemed to breathe on the crystalline surface. He drew the great heartwood arteries, the mycelial networks, the paths of water and life. This was his territory, and he was showing it to her not as a place, but as a body.
Then, he began to draw the sickness.
Starting from the east, near the border she patrolled, he drew a new flow. A black, creeping line that did not follow the logic of the forest. It cut across the life-veins, poisoning them. He marked the location of Elina Rovio’s village with a dark, festering blot. He drew its vector, a westward push, its speed accelerating as it consumed more biomass. The map was no longer a diagram of life, but a chart of a spreading necrosis, rendered with the terrible, intimate knowledge of a warden watching his own grove die.
— It’s a new strain. Faster. The old Withering is like a slow frost. This is a fire. It inverts symbiosis, — he said, his voice low and focused, not looking up from his work.
Anastasya watched, her skepticism warring with a grudging fascination. The drawing was chaotic, organic, an offense to the clean geometry of Regalis thought. Yet, it had a terrifying internal logic.
— It teaches the light to become rot, — Lauri finished, his stylus hovering over the slate. The map was complete. It was a portrait of her failure, and his.
— Baseless assertions from a degenerate, — she said, the words automatic, a defense mechanism of her training. But there was no conviction in them. She turned and activated her own Data-Slate.
On its surface, a grid of stark, glowing lines appeared. Patrol routes. Timetables. Casualty reports. She began to cross-reference his drawing. She overlaid the locations of her lost patrols. They fell directly on the black lines he had drawn. She checked the reports of equipment failure, of armor corrosion on units that had returned. The data points aligned with the areas he had marked as having the highest concentration of the Tears of Ash.
The correlation was absolute. It was not close; it was perfect. Ninety-nine percent. The chaotic, hand-drawn map of a savage was a more accurate predictor of her losses than all the intelligence gathered by the Chancellery of Forms. A cold dread, colder than the room’s light, settled in her stomach. Her entire worldview, built on the bedrock of Regalis superiority and the infallibility of its data, had just been fractured. The prisoner was not lying. Which meant her government was.
Lauri saw the shift in her posture, the way her knuckles whitened as she gripped her slate. He pressed his advantage. He reached out a trembling finger and pointed to a sector on her map, an area her patrols had marked as clear. On her display, there was a faint, almost imperceptible flicker in the energy grid readings, a piece of sensor noise dismissed by her analysts.
— There, — he said. — That flicker. You see it?
— It is a sensor anomaly. Within acceptable parameters, — she stated, her voice tight.
Lauri corrected her, his voice quiet but carrying the weight of absolute certainty. — It’s not an anomaly. It’s biotic stress. It’s the sound the forest makes just before it starts to scream. You’re not trained to see it. You listen for the breaking, not the bending. By the time your machines register the threat, it’s already too late.
He was showing her a language she couldn’t speak, a layer of reality her senses were blind to. He was not just a source of information. He was a necessary tool. The price of her certainty was its utter annihilation.
Anastasya Orlova stood motionless for a full minute. The only sound was the faint, steady hum of the outpost’s life support. She was reassessing everything. The mission. The enemy. The prisoner before her. He was a broken thing, a man shaking apart from the inside out, reeking of the forest’s decay. But he could see the truth in a way she could not. He was a key.
She lowered her Data-Slate, the light from its surface extinguishing. The interrogation was over. Her expression was no longer contemptuous. It was something far more dangerous: thoughtful. The shift was complete. He was no longer a prisoner to be processed. He was an asset to be deployed.
The blue light of the corridor hummed with silent energy. Outside the room, a heavy gate clanged shut.
