November 7, 2025
10:00 PM CST

They came in pairs at first.

Two crows on the split-rail fence at dawn. Silent. Unmoving.

Elsie Durham watched from the kitchen window of her cabin, a chipped mug of black coffee cooling in her hands. She lived alone in the upper reaches of the Michigan forest, by choice. No internet. No neighbors. Just the occasional squirrel and her shortwave radio.

On the second day, there were four.

Then eight.

Always multiples of two. Always still.

At first, she figured they were after the compost pile. But they never moved. Never fed. Just perched and stared. Eyes like polished jet. And they always landed in precise formations—rows, triangles, arcs that curved toward the door.

It made her skin crawl.

On day five, they arranged in a perfect spiral on the snow. Twenty crows, sitting in rings, motionless in the frost.

Elsie didn’t go outside that day. She locked her door and turned up the radio static.

That night, she dreamed of beaks pecking out Morse code in her eardrums.

The next morning, thirty-two.

She tried firing a warning shot. Not one flew.

She tried playing music. They blinked.

She tried reasoning out loud. “Go away! You’re just birds!”

That’s when they began to count aloud.

Not in human voices, no. But in the rhythmic tapping of claws on the porch rail. One tap. Two taps. Four. Eight.

Elsie froze.

The crows were doubling. Not just in number—but in knowledge. Each day, more appeared, forming more complex shapes—fractals, glyphs, runes she didn’t recognize but somehow understood. They weren’t watching.

They were measuring.

On the seventh night, she scrawled a desperate plea into her journal: They’re charting me. We are not alone here. I think I’m the variable.

At midnight, she heard the knock at the door—not from a beak, but a hand. Three slow raps.

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

The next morning, a search party found the cabin abandoned.

Inside, a spiral of black feathers surrounded a single word scratched into the floorboards:

“Solved.”