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Chapter Six: Disbelief
Word spreads quickly in the cloistered halls of academia.
By the second week after the comet’s appearance, Elias could feel the eyes of colleagues trailing him as he walked the corridors of the university. Whispers followed him like shadows.
He’s chasing a ghost.
Maybe stress finally cracked him.
I heard he thinks a comet changed his life.
The words pricked, but Elias buried himself in charts and logs, scouring every observatory database he could access. Nothing. No record. It was as if the comet had never existed at all.
And that, he thought grimly, was worse than mockery: silence.
The silence ended when Dr. Nathaniel Cross knocked on his office door one morning.
Cross was everything Elias despised about science without wonder: arrogant, polished, quick with a sneer. He leaned against the doorframe, arms folded, his tailored suit catching the sunlight like armor.
“Thorne,” he said, voice dripping with false cheer. “I hear you’ve developed… an interest in mythology.”
Elias stiffened. “It wasn’t mythology. I saw it with my own eyes.”
Cross smirked. “Ah yes, the miraculous comet that no telescope recorded, no observatory noted, no astronomer on Earth has confirmed. A convenient vision, isn’t it?”
“It was real.” Elias’s tone cracked sharper than he intended.
Cross stepped inside, circling the office. His gaze lingered on the notebooks scattered across the desk—page after page filled with sketches, not equations.
“This is what you’ve become?” Cross said, lips curling. “A once-promising scientist reduced to doodling fairy tales? Chasing dreams like a poet?”
Elias’s hands balled into fists. “It changed me. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand perfectly,” Cross said, eyes narrowing. “You’ve finally cracked under the pressure. All those years pretending science could save you, when really you were just a lonely man staring at the stars, begging for meaning.”
The words cut deep, because they were true in ways Elias could never admit.
Cross leaned closer, lowering his voice. “The universe doesn’t care about you, Thorne. It doesn’t write love letters across the sky. Comets are rocks. Dust and ice. That’s it. Anything else you think you saw? That’s desperation talking.”
Elias’s chest burned. He wanted to throw Cross out, to silence him, but instead he heard himself say, “Maybe dust and ice can still mean something.”
Cross barked a laugh. “You’re pathetic. You’ve traded knowledge for fantasy.”
With that, he left, slamming the door behind him.
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