Europols main office buzzed with intent sounds. The tapping of keyboards formed a rhythmic beat the background chatter of phone calls created a steady deep hum and crisis maps glowing on monitors added a silent urgent visual rhythm. Devon was at the center of this scene holding his resignation letter—a unmoving piece of paper. He had come back specifically to deliver it face-, to-face.
Pamela Pauline glanced at it from her office surrounded by glass. She said nothing. Instead she stared at him noticing the lasting calm in his gaze that went beyond mere exhaustion.
"Where are you headed?" she inquired, the query serving as a substitute, for all the rest.
"Somewhere modest " he remarked. "Somewhere where the effort aligns with the size of the location."
He selected San Marino. Not because of Hugo Hubert. Due, to its intrinsic paradox. A republic situated atop a mountain, autonomous yet completely surrounded by a vast hectic world. A land of tiny-scale aims and age-old steady stone. A microstate. A controllable fragment of reality.
He leased a stone cottage on the inclines of Monte Titano. The scenery consisted of quilted fields and faraway misty Italian plains. The atmosphere was crisp and light. The prominent noise was the breeze or the chimes, from the Palazzo Pubblico indicating time that seemed extended less pressing.
He never truly "retired" in any way. He didn't tend to a garden create art or compose memoirs. He simply lived. He became attuned to the pace of the lone bakery, the pair of cafes the library where elderly men perused newspapers discussing a realm that felt distant. He wandered leisurely along the age- trails the pebble from Glen Lyon a constant presence, in his pocket.
The Great Fatigue had not disappeared. It became the filter through which he perceived all things. He noticed it in the intentional rhythm of the nonno organizing his produce at the market. He observed it in the extended, gaps, between words while conversing with his aged neighbor. This was not the manufactured calm of the cult. It was a gradualness. A tempo shaped by geography and past not by hopelessness.
Occasionally he would drop by to see Hugo. Their talks in the visitor's area had ceased to be arguments. Instead they became two patients exchanging observations, about the prolonged ailment.
"Are you longing for the excitement?" Hugo inquired one afternoon sunlight casting a patch, on the floor between them.
"I long for the straightforwardness of a crisis " Devon confessed. "The ease of having a problem to fix. This…" he motioned vaguely taking in the room the silent countryside, the silence, within himself "…this is the consequence. It's tougher. It's no longer a problem. It's simply… existing."
Hugo agreed. "According to our writings existence is the primordial sin. The initial and most exhausting deed."
Devon didn't object.. Here in San Marino the weariness seemed natural. It was the exhaustion of the mountain itself of the weathered stone stairs of the republic that had merely endured as empires emerged and collapsed nearby. It was a tiredness he could live with, not one that aimed to engulf everything.
He got a note, from Alistair Croft's caretaker. The don had died peacefully in his sleep. No resistance. His last words, said to a nurse the day were: "The equation is… suspended." An appropriate cryptic epitaph.
Devon creased the letter. Slid it into a drawer. He experienced no victory, a somber sense of kinship. Croft had come to his decision. Devon existed in the pause of his own making.
He rested on his balcony as the sun dipped, casting a golden hue on the city's stone towers towering above him. The faraway Italian plains started to twinkle with the radiant lights of a world that remained lively. He existed in a space that was neither here nor there. He occupied the center the small realm, between movement and yielding.
He hadn't recovered. He had moved. He swapped the extensive draining war zone for a calm outpost. His responsibility was no longer to combat the Great Fatigue. To care for it within himself patiently as one would care for a soldier's long-standing injury. It wasn't a conquest. It was a settled truce.. In the rarefied lofty atmosphere of San Marino for the first time, in what seemed like ages the conditions seemed maintainable. He was not a hero, and not a fraud. He was just a man, on a mountain, learning the profound and unexceptional art of being very, very still.