The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

I don't know how long I sat there before I understood, fully, what I was looking at.

Time in the Between has always been slippery in a way I've never fully made peace with — long enough as a plant, watching light change without any way to count it, that some deep part of me lost the habit of measuring duration at all, and has never quite recovered it. But I know it was long. I know the light shifted more than once, the pale imitation-sun tracking whatever arc it tracks across a sky that may or may not be a real sky, and that she tracked it with her whole unmoving body each time, the smallest, most patient reorientation, like something rooted turning toward a source of warmth it could not name and had never questioned.

I tried speaking to her several more times, in several different registers — gentle, then plain, then, once, in something closer to the tone I would have used to address a frightened animal, low and slow and full of nothing but reassurance. None of it landed. Not because she was refusing to hear me, I came to understand, but because there was, as far as I could tell, no mechanism inside her built for hearing anything at all. Language did not appear to reach whatever she was. Not my language, not any language. She was not choosing silence. Silence was simply the entire shape of her, the way it had once been the entire shape of me.

It was the way she did not react to threat that told me, finally, what I was looking at.

A hawk — or the Between's pale, silent version of one, a bird-shaped drift of grey light that moves the way birds move without any of the sound birds should make — dropped low over the rise where she stood, close enough that its shadow crossed her, close enough that any silhouette with an intact sense of self-preservation would have flinched, or startled, or at the very least registered the near miss with some shift of posture. She did nothing. She did not know to be afraid of it, because fear, I was beginning to understand, requires a self that recognizes itself as a thing which can be lost — and whatever she had been, before this shape, had never needed to develop that particular recognition.

I have spent a very long time turning over what she must have been, in the life before this one, and I have never landed on a certainty, because she has never been able to tell me, not fully, not even now, all these years later — some things about a soul's original shape simply don't survive the crossing intact enough to be recovered. But I have my guess, built slowly out of everything I watched her fail to understand in the days that followed, and I believe it, the way you believe something you've assembled with real care out of real evidence rather than something you've simply decided to believe because it's comforting.

I think she was a plant. Not a plant-soul who had learned, somewhere along the way, to speak and reason and hold a human shape, the way the small, rare handful of us who arrive here as flora eventually manage, if the Between is patient with us and we are patient with ourselves. I think she was simply, entirely, without remainder, a plant — a living thing that had spent its whole existence rooted somewhere in Something, growing toward light and away from shadow with no more interiority than any growing thing requires, and had died the way plants die, without ceremony, without any of the narrative structure a human death carries with it, and had woken here anyway, because the Between does not discriminate in what it collects. Every dead thing wakes as a silhouette. Human, alien, god, dragon, elf, dwarf, demon, unicorn, animal —

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Plant.

She had died as something with no concept of death, no concept of self, no concept of anything except growing where it was planted and turning toward whatever light reached it — and she had woken here with a body capable of walking, and speaking, and choosing, and she did not know any of those capabilities existed, because nothing in what she had been before had ever needed them.

I sat with that understanding for a long time before I could make myself move again. I do not know how to fully describe what it felt like, except that it felt like grief for someone I had not yet met, and recognition of someone I had already, in some strange sideways way, always known — because whatever she was going through now, whatever confusion and absence and unprocessed nothing was sitting where a person's understanding of the world should have been, I had lived through some version of it myself, alone, for longer than I have ever let myself measure honestly.

The difference was that I had been kept. Someone had loved me, uselessly, silently, across every one of those years — had sat with a plant that could not answer her and had gone on loving it anyway, because the Empress of Eternity does not know how to do anything by half measures, not even loving something that cannot love her back in any way she can perceive.

This silhouette had no one. She had been standing on this hillside, waiting for a sun that meant nothing except heat and light and the old, wordless comfort of being warmed, for however long it had taken me to walk close enough to see her — and before that, for however long she had been here at all, in a world enormous enough that a soul could walk for weeks and pass no one, she had, as far as I could tell, been entirely alone.

I moved closer, then. Close enough that if she had had eyes in any conventional sense, we would have been looking at each other. "I see you," I said, quietly, not expecting an answer, saying it more for myself than for her — a kind of vow, though I didn't recognize it as one yet. "I see what you are. You're not broken. You're just — new. In a way nobody's ever explained to you."

She turned her face, very slightly, toward the sound of my voice — not toward me, I understood, watching closely, but toward the warmth of the sound itself, the way a plant turns toward anything that resembles light, whether or not it understands what light is for. It was the first response she had given me all day. It was not recognition. It was not even, in any meaningful sense, communication.

But it was something. And something, I had learned a very long time ago, in a much slower and much lonelier version of this exact moment, is where every single thing that matters eventually begins.

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