❖ The Gears of Humanity VII ❖
Time passed differently in Garnelion when no one spoke.
The silence wasn't empty, but full—swollen with steam, gear creaks, and the memory of things left unsaid. After the encounter with the Mirror of Time, Rowan hadn't returned to the guest room in Emeric's home. He stayed out until the night soaked the streets, walking beneath swaying gaslights and electric moons that flickered behind clouds like dying stars.
He returned not with answers, but with silence etched deep into his chest.
Now, morning again.
Steam curled through the sitting room's brass vents. The clock on the wall chimed seven times, each note long and deliberate, like a tolling bell at a funeral.
Emeric sat at the table, already waiting.
The chessboard had been set.
Noelle was nowhere in sight.
There were no distractions—only the two of them, and the board between them. The rain outside had gentled, replaced by a kind of heavy stillness, as if the entire city held its breath to watch what came next.
Rowan approached and pulled back the chair opposite Emeric.
Neither said a word at first. The board gleamed in polished walnut, its edges engraved with Garnelion's skyline. Each piece was handcrafted—steam-burnished ivory and obsidian steel. The white queen resembled a robed angel with cogwheels for wings; the black king wore a crown of rusted thorns.
Rowan sat.
Emeric didn't look up. "You've improved."
"I didn't sleep."
Emeric moved first. Pawn to e4.
"I never do," Rowan murmured. Pawn to c5.
Sicilian Defense. A warlike beginning.
And just like that, the match began—not just of chess, but of minds.
The game became the language. Every move was a sentence. Every pause, a breath. And each variation they steered into felt like drawing blood with a philosophy.
Knight to f3.
"Do you believe," Emeric said, "that truth matters more than comfort?"
Knight to c6.
"I believe comfort is what people kill for," Rowan replied. "Not truth."
Bishop to b5. Rossolimo variation.
"You think comfort is weakness," Emeric said.
"I think comfort's a prison," Rowan countered. "People lock themselves inside it and call it home."
Pawn to g6.
"Do you see everyone that way?" Emeric asked. "Even Noelle?"
Rowan looked at him for a moment, then moved his bishop back.
Bishop a4.
"I think Noelle chose her cell carefully."
They played ten moves in silence.
It was a razor-edge line—hypermodern, where space was surrendered for control. Neither side overextended. They were probing each other, not for mistakes, but for beliefs.
Emeric castled kingside.
His next words were sharper.
"So is pain more honest than peace?"
Rowan moved his queen's pawn forward.
"Pain is honest. Peace is an anesthetic."
They were thirty moves in.
By then, the opening had collapsed into a ferocious middlegame—one where the board looked less like a battlefield and more like a philosophy textbook half-burned. Rowan had sacrificed two pawns for initiative. Emeric responded with ruthless precision, holding tension with bishop and knight locked like dueling poets.
Their voices, too, became the game.
"Do you want to save people, Rowan?" Emeric asked, sliding his knight to f4. It danced near Rowan's king, threatening.
"I want to understand them," Rowan said, placing his rook on d1. "But I think saving and understanding are incompatible."
"Why?"
"Because when you save someone, you overwrite their ruin with your narrative. You don't understand their pain. You repurpose it."
Emeric took the rook. Exchange.
"Then why are you here? Why join this case? Why walk into horror?"
Rowan stared at the board.
His knight was en prise.
He didn't defend it.
"I walk into horror," he said, "because I'm hoping it'll recognize me."
Emeric said nothing for a long time.
Then he advanced his pawn to e5—bold, centralizing, aggressive. His position was solid now, his minor pieces radiant in harmony.
Rowan was behind on material.
But not on pressure.
Queen to g4. Threatening a pin.
Their kings had castled to opposite flanks. The battlefield had split. But the conversation had not.
"Do you think there's meaning in suffering?" Emeric asked.
"No," Rowan said immediately. "Meaning is assigned postmortem. Suffering just is."
"Then why try to make sense of it?"
Rowan leaned forward.
"Because if I don't, it kills me."
The air grew heavier. The board sweat with tension.
Each move now had weight—not just tactically, but psychologically. Emeric used every second of his time, calculating lines fifteen moves ahead, searching for patterns.
Rowan didn't always calculate. Sometimes he felt the board—like it was a mind to be deciphered, a fate to be tempted.
The pieces became avatars of their ideologies.
Rowan's bishop, fianchettoed long ago, had lain dormant—watching the diagonal like a dormant regret.
Emeric's queen, still coiled near his king, waited like truth in shadow.
Rowan made a bold move.
Knight to d5.
Sacrificing his last knight for positional grip—center dominance.
Emeric leaned back. "That's the kind of move someone makes when they have nothing to lose."
Rowan smiled faintly. "I don't."
But Emeric didn't blunder.
He didn't play passively.
He adapted.
Move after move, he endured Rowan's pressure.
And like a city withstanding siege, he waited until Rowan's initiative ran dry.
Then he counterattacked.
Brilliantly.
A knight fork.
A bishop pin.
A queen infiltration.
Rowan's defenses cracked.
He lost control of the center. His king was exposed. His pawns fragmented.
Move 57.
Emeric promoted a pawn.
Queen.
Rowan had no mating net. No counterplay. Only delay.
He looked up at Emeric.
"You win."
Emeric nodded, but didn't smile.
"I was never trying to win," he said.
Rowan reset the board with quiet fingers.
"Then why play?"
"To see how far you'd go."
Emeric stood, slowly pulling on his coat.
"But I think we've both gone far enough."
He walked to the door, pausing only once.
"I don't hate your answers," he said. "I just fear them."
As the last echo of Emeric's footsteps faded into the quiet of the room, Rowan sat alone at the chessboard. The pieces were arranged in perfect disarray, a reflection of the chaos that now churned within him. The debate had ended without resolution, a space between them now filled with questions that no longer seemed to have clear answers. The chessboard, once a battleground of intellect, now felt like a prison, each piece frozen in place as if mocking his inability to move forward.
A coldness settled over the room. Rowan's fingers lingered over the surface of the board, tracing the edges of the pieces without truly seeing them. His thoughts, once sharp and clear, were now tangled, spiraling inward. The moves they had made in the game—each one a step toward some higher understanding—now felt futile. They were empty, as if the game itself was nothing more than a distraction from the real question he could not escape.
What was it all for?
He could still feel the weight of Emeric's presence, even though the man had left. It clung to him like the heavy air of Garnelion, damp and oppressive. The debate they had shared, the endless exchange of ideals and logic, seemed to have led them nowhere. It was as though they had walked in circles, each step bringing them closer to some profound truth, only to find that the truth was nothing more than a shadow, ever out of reach.
Rowan's gaze drifted to the window, though the fog outside obscured any view of the city. The distant hum of gears and steam seemed faint, as though the world itself was slipping into silence. Everything around him seemed so distant, as if the room, the city, and the very air he breathed were all part of a dream he could not wake from. Time, too, seemed to stretch and distort. The moments between breaths felt longer, heavier, until the ticking of the clock in the corner grew too loud, too intrusive. The very sound of time itself seemed to echo in his ears, growing louder with each passing second.
He closed his eyes, trying to block out the noise. But the silence that followed was no better. It was thick, pressing down on him, and with it came the weight of everything that had come before. The cases, the mysteries, the endless questions that had led him here—all of it seemed so small now. He had been searching for answers, for meaning, but the more he searched, the more elusive they became.
The pieces on the chessboard remained frozen, but Rowan could feel them shifting in his mind. The game, the debate—everything was blurring, merging into a single point of frustration and confusion. He was caught in a spiral, unable to break free, the darkness inside him growing ever deeper.
The clock struck midnight.
The sound was sharp. Final.
Rowan looked up. For a moment, everything held still—the chessboard, the fog-choked windows, the glint of gaslight dancing across scattered documents. And then it began.
A tremor passed through the room. Subtle at first, like the breath of something ancient exhaling through the walls. Then stronger. The air warped.
Rowan turned, but he wasn't moving. Something else moved him.
A force gripped his spine—not hands, not wind, but a pressure, deliberate and slow, that began to drag him backward.
"No—"
His voice vanished in the air as his heels skidded across the floor. The room unraveled. The bookshelves, the maps, the chessboard—they twisted, contorted, then shattered.
Glass.
He collided with the first wall of reality. It fractured like a mirror under pressure—no pain, just the sensation of rupture. Then another. And another.
Each impact shattered a part of the world: the room, Garnelion, the gears, the ticking clock, Emeric's voice, Alina's face—gone, like panes of brittle memory.
Backwards.
Faster.
He tumbled through shards of thoughts and time, fragments catching light like stars dying in reverse. With every crash, he felt less anchored, more fragmented. His limbs felt distant. His breath was lost to the void. The sounds were distant echoes—his own voice, speaking lines he couldn't remember uttering. The room was long gone. So was the city. So was the game.
He crashed through the final layer—a darkness thicker than pitch—and then, nothing.
Suspended.
Floating.
Empty.
No walls. No ground. Only that cold, familiar silence.
A breath.
A single thought, faint and flickering like the last light of a dying lantern:
"What's left… when even meaning fractures?"
His chest rose once, as if he might scream. But the sound never came.
And then, like the last grain of sand slipping from an hourglass, Rowan fell.