VoidHive Codex — Arc 4, Chapter 26: The Wait

[PERSONAL LOG — LT. SERA VANCE — DAY 17, ARCHITECT PROJECT]

Admiral Coss has not replied.

I tell myself this is bureaucracy. Fourteen pages of recommendation don't move through Joint Command in forty-eight hours — they move through committees, through legal review, through the kind of silence that precedes decisions that cannot be undone. I know this. I have served long enough to know this.

It doesn't make the waiting easier.

Lumen has been quieter since the Council. The three elders haven't returned. I don't know if that means something or nothing — I'm still learning the grammar of their presence, still learning which silences are contemplative and which are significant. I asked Lumen directly this morning. It arranged its light into a shape I've started to recognise as patience, and then it showed me something new: a filament I hadn't touched before, running deeper into the station's core, pulsing with a rhythm that felt almost like a heartbeat.

Almost like waiting.

I think the Architects are nervous too.

That thought should probably alarm me. It doesn't. It makes them feel, for the first time, genuinely comprehensible.