- 'To avoid predation, many species will hide during reproduction; but once they emerge, the very newborn young will become a feast.'
---
Kael lay awake long after the house had surrendered to silence. His bedroom window was open by a crack, just enough for the night air to spill in, carrying with it the faint smell of wet concrete and the rhythmic hum of some distant machinery. He should have been sleeping; tomorrow promised a long, tedious day of routine. But the thought of routine itself kept him awake, an iron weight pressing against his chest.
He turned onto his side, then back again, as though the mattress itself conspired against rest. Each movement made the shadows shift across his walls. One stretched itself tall and spindly, like the silhouette of an insect clinging to plaster.
Insects.
The word surfaced unbidden, and with it a memory—Lucian's voice, calm and precise, drawing parallels between the students around them and creatures that crawled and multiplied without purpose. Kael had listened, half uneasy, half fascinated, as Lucian dissected their behavior with scalpel-like detachment. Tonight, those words came back to him.
He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead.
Parasites, vermin, repulsing creatures crawling in the dark…
Kael imagined the lecture hall again, the dull scraping of pens on paper. He remembered his own hands, restless, clenched, slick with imagined blood. And behind it all: Lucian's certainty, his conviction that these people did not deserve the dignity of being called human.
It was a thought Kael had resisted at first. But now it was in him—sliding, burrowing, reshaping.
Kael rose from bed, restless, the sheets tangled like they had been trying to hold him down. The room breathed with its usual clutter: stacks of textbooks, loose paper, graphite smudges rubbed into the desk. He paced once, twice, then leaned over the desk as though it might anchor him. The lamplight burned too brightly for the hour, throwing a circle of gold across the paper-strewn surface.
From within that circle, a movement caught his eye. A silverfish slipped free of its hiding place, its body flashing with faint metallic sheen. Antennae quivered like searching fingers, the creature zigzagging across the page in disjointed motions.
Kael froze.
He watched with an intensity that felt misplaced, transfixed by something so utterly small. The insect carried no intent, no higher thought. Its existence was mechanical—jerks and darts across the paper, obedience to nothing but instinct. For one strange second, he envied it. The simplicity. The refusal of self-awareness. Just living, continuing. But the envy soured as quickly as it had bloomed.
Was this what people were, stripped of their words, their polished masks, their rituals of order? Nothing more than instinct-driven pests, crawling across the structures built for them? The thought came unbidden, almost foreign—yet it fit too neatly to dismiss.
His throat tightened.
Kael reached out, closed his notebook on the creature. The act was swift, unhesitating, but not impulsive. The sound was next to nothing, a soft compression of pages meeting—but in its wake, the silence spread thick, as though the entire room had drawn in a breath.
He opened the cover slowly, expecting… he wasn't sure what. The silverfish lay crushed between the lines of his sketchwork. Its body had smeared, leaving a dark-gray stain streaked with pearlescent scales. The mess should have repulsed him. It should have sent a shiver through him. But it didn't.
Instead, Kael's gaze lingered, thoughtful. The smear wasn't ruin—it was possibility.
He sat down, dragging the notebook toward him. With his pencil, he began to work around the mark. The streaks of scale became fractured beams of light, the curve of the insect's body blending seamlessly into the outline of a dying star collapsing in on itself. The splatter spread into wings of a dark figure at the center, faceless, half-formed, standing above a swarm of smaller figures scuttling below. It wasn't art in the way his teachers would approve, but it was… precise. Deliberate. A statement.
The insect's remains were no longer a mess. They were essential to the image.
And Kael felt something twist inside him, not horror, not regret—something sharper. A flicker of exhilaration that expanded into his chest, so subtle it almost frightened him. But it wasn't fear. It was clarity.
He leaned back in his chair, staring at the grotesque little masterpiece. Wasn't this the truth of things? That life existed only as material, to be used, to be folded into something larger? The insect had been nothing, and now it was something more than it could have ever been alive.
The thought came again, quieter this time, but rooted: weren't people like this too? Pests that clung to routines, scraping meaning where there was none, waiting to be crushed into something useful by the few strong enough to shape them?
Lucian's voice echoed in Kael's memory without ever having been spoken aloud. Lucian never wasted words on direct instruction. But the way he looked at others, the way he moved through the corridors with effortless dominance—it had always implied the same truth. That people were insects, and he was not.
Kael closed the notebook and held it in his lap. The smear of the silverfish pressed between pages felt like a secret. A secret only someone 'human' would understand.
He should have felt disgust. He should have scrubbed the scales from the paper, torn the page out, or even thrown the notebook into the waste bin. Instead, he found himself smiling faintly—an unfamiliar curl of the lips, almost weightless.
When he finally pushed away from the desk, the room felt different. Not brighter, not darker. Just lighter, the night air through his window softly cutting against his cheek. Like the edges of things had been honed.
Kael didn't sleep much that night. The thought of the insect lingered, stitched into his mind alongside the art it had left behind. A whisper of superiority—strange, foreign, yet intoxicating—followed him as he lay awake, staring into the dark.
---
By morning, his exhaustion showed in the gray tint beneath his eyes, but Kael didn't care. School was the same procession it always was: students shuffling into classrooms, voices bouncing against tiled walls, the dull roar of conversations that never rose to significance.
Yet something felt different.
He moved through the corridors with the same pace as always, yet his gaze lingered longer on faces, cataloguing the sameness of them, the flatness of expression. He caught himself counting the flickers of confusion when teachers spoke, the mechanical way pens scratched down dictated notes. Each gesture reminded him of the silverfish's twitching, the scuttling across unseen surfaces.
Once again, the thought should have disturbed him. Instead, it gave him clarity.
He sat through lessons with his chin propped on his hand, his eyes half-lidded. Around him, the others scribbled furiously, their desperation almost laughable. They didn't question what they learned. They didn't even think—they merely absorbed, processed, repeated.
Kael tried something new.
He imagined the entire room stripped of its desks and chairs, the students crawling across the floor with twitching antennae, sliding in and out of cracks in the plaster. Their voices were replaced by faint scratching. Their words, meaningless.
The image was grotesque, yet strangely liberating.
For once, Kael didn't feel like the one who lagged behind, the one who strained to keep up. He wasn't one of them at all. He was apart. Above.
And in that separation, he felt stronger.
---
Lucian watched him.
Not obviously, never obviously. Lucian had perfected the art of appearing attentive to something else while observing exactly what mattered. A notebook open, pen balanced between his fingers, eyes occasionally meeting the board, then returning to idle doodles that served as camouflage. But beneath that casual posture his attention sharpened like a scalpel.
Kael was changing.
Lucian hadn't exactly expected it, however. Even though he knew that influence, properly applied, never failed to take root. But the speed of it was noteworthy. Kael's gaze had altered; no longer restless and uncertain, it now carried a shadow of calculation.
Lucian closed his notebook with quiet finality. He considered the word Kael did not yet know he embodied: apprentice.
The others in the room scarcely existed in Lucian's perception. They were background noise, set pieces against which meaningful actions unfolded. He could almost hear them rustle, soft and ceaseless. Not human. They consumed without thought, lived without reflection.
It was an efficient existence, perhaps—but not a dignified one.
Lucian, by contrast, did not crawl. He moved with precision, with intention. Every word he spoke was chosen for effect. Every smile calibrated, every silence weighed. He had long since accepted that what people called "humanity" was nothing more than a fragile story told to keep the mass content.
But he was not mass.
He was the exception.
And perhaps Kael could become one too.
Lucian let his gaze drift again, outwardly disinterested, inwardly calculating. The boy had crushed the insect last night—he was certain of it. The detail was irrelevant; the truth lay in Kael's posture, the new stillness of his shoulders, the faint trace of pride he carried.
Good.
Silverfish thrived in darkness, multiplying endlessly, unseen until infestation became unbearable. But Lucian did not intend to let the infestation go unchecked. He intended to rise above it, to feed on it, to craft something sharper from the decay.
His lips curved, faint and private.
Soon, just maybe, Kael would see it too.