The Comet: Chapter Five: Afterglow

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The comet had been gone for five nights, but Elias still saw it everywhere.

In the flicker of headlights, in the arc of chalk dust across a blackboard, in the quick flare of a match outside the university library. The world had become littered with echoes, each one reminding him of the blaze that had torn open the sky and something inside him with it.

He filled notebook after notebook with sketches. Not equations—though at first he tried. He mapped coordinates, tracked star charts, scoured astronomical reports. Nothing accounted for the sighting. No record, no prediction.

So, he began to draw instead. The comet scrawled in margins, the silver blaze arcing across page after page, always slightly different, always incomplete. His students noticed the shift: the precise professor suddenly absentminded, chalk pausing mid-equation as his eyes drifted toward the window.

“Are you all right, Dr. Thorne?” Sophie, one of his brightest pupils, asked one morning as he faltered during a lecture on gravitational constants.

“Yes,” Elias said too quickly, though the chalk snapped in his hand. “Continue your notes.”

But the truth was plain: he was unraveling.

That evening he found himself once again at the gallery. The smell of paint and turpentine clung to the air like incense. Claire was perched on a stool, her hair twisted messily, brush sweeping across a canvas.

“You’re obsessed,” she said without looking up.

“With what?” he asked, though he knew.

“The comet,” she said, dipping her brush into gold. “I can see it all over your face. You’re chasing it like it owes you something.”

Elias stiffened. “I’m studying it.”

“No,” Claire said softly. “You’re longing for it.”