Chapter 455 --455
Chapter 455: Chapter-455
The concept of "powering down" was, entirely frankly, a logistical nightmare for Elara.For the first three minutes after Julian guided her toward the plush, velvet sitting chairs near the grand fireplace, she simply sat there. She kept her spine perfectly straight, her hands folded neatly in her lap over the cheap linen of her commoner’s dress, and her glass-bead eyes locked onto the unlit hearth.
Julian sat in the chair opposite her. He rested his elbows on his knees, watching her with a mixture of amusement and deep, underlying concern.
"You look like you are bracing for an artillery strike," Julian noted softly into the quiet room.
"I am attempting to execute the ’do nothing’ protocol," Elara replied, her voice maintaining its flat, clinical baseline. "However, without a designated focal point or a kinetic objective, my cognitive processors are struggling to establish a resting state. It is highly inefficient."
Julian let out a quiet sigh, rubbing the back of his neck. "Elara, resting isn’t a protocol. You don’t execute it. You just... let go. Tell me, what do you usually think about when you aren’t thinking about the empire?"
Elara blinked. She ran a search through her internal memory banks, searching for a single instance in the last decade where her mind was not occupied by troop deployments, tax yields, agricultural deficits, or assassination plots.
The search yielded zero results.
"The query is invalid," Elara stated. "There is no data outside of the empire."
Julian’s face softened, a heartbreaking sort of pity flashing in his ice-blue eyes. He stood up from his chair, crossed the small distance between them, and knelt directly on the thick carpet in front of her.
Elara looked down at him. Her internal thermal anomaly—that strange, heavy warmth that defied all medical logic—spiked again. Having the Northern Prince kneeling at her feet was not a new visual; political subordinates knelt before her daily. But Julian was not kneeling in submission. He was kneeling to catch her eye level, to invade the sterile, impenetrable bubble she had built around herself.
"Then let’s create some new data," Julian said gently. He reached out and, with entirely unearned audacity, took her folded hands into his own. "Focus on right now. What do you hear?"
Elara’s brow furrowed slightly at the strange request. She closed her eyes to optimize her auditory sensors. "I hear the wind hitting the eastern glass panes at approximately twelve knots. I hear the shifting of Commander Ken’s plated boots in the corridor outside. He is currently shifting his weight to his left leg, indicating a localized fatigue in his right knee."