The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

She was not always called the Witch of Infinite Time. I don't know what she was called before that, in whatever earlier, smaller life preceded the centuries that earned her the title — she has never told me, and I have never pushed, because some names, I think, belong only to the people who outgrew them, and asking for them back would be its own kind of theft.

What I know, pieced together across years of half-answers and the rare, unguarded evening like the one behind us now, is this: she was born mortal, in a world she describes only ever in fragments, and became, through means she has never fully detailed, the single strongest mortal-born practitioner her entire world would ever produce — a woman who bent time itself to her will not through any divine gift, but through sheer, relentless, unforgiving study, the kind of mastery that costs a person everything ordinary about themselves in exchange for becoming extraordinary. She told me once, lightly, the way she tells most devastating things, that she stopped aging somewhere in her second century of life and never quite noticed the exact day it happened, because she had long since stopped counting days the way ordinary people count them.

She spent the whole of that impossibly long life searching for something. She has never told me, plainly, what — and I have my private theories, built slowly out of the shape of her silences rather than out of anything she's confirmed, but I have never asked her to confirm them, because I think some searches are only bearable if the searcher gets to keep some small, private part of the reason to herself.

What she has told me, flatly, without her usual wit softening the edges of it, is that she searched for centuries, across whole civilizations that rose and fell around her while she remained exactly the same — outlasting friends, students, entire schools of thought she'd founded and then watched calcify into dogma and crumble into dust, outlasting every single person who had ever known her before the power set in and made her something closer to a fixture of the landscape than a person moving through it. And that eventually, having searched every corner of her own world worth searching, having exhausted every avenue her considerable, terrifying intellect could construct, she understood, with the particular flat certainty of someone who has run out of ideas rather than run out of hope, that what she was looking for did not exist. Had perhaps never existed. Was, possibly, simply a story she had told herself in her earliest, smallest years to make an unbearably long life feel like it was moving toward something instead of simply, endlessly, continuing.

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"I died on purpose," she told me once, in that same flat, unguarded voice, "because there was nothing left to look for, and looking was the only thing I had ever actually been good at. A woman who has run out of a reason to keep searching is not, in any meaningful sense, alive anymore. She is simply a body that hasn't yet noticed it should stop."

I have never asked her, directly, what it was she spent all those centuries looking for. I suspect, now, having watched her across the years I've known her, having felt the particular quality of relief that moves through her on nights like tonight — quiet, unguarded, entirely without her usual armor — that I already know the answer, and that saying it aloud, even now, even this far removed from the woman who searched so long and found nothing, would be its own small unkindness. Some truths are better left as something a person gets to arrive at on her own, in her own time, rather than something handed to her by someone else's certainty.

She arrived in the Between the same way everyone does — as a silhouette, faceless, unremarkable, indistinguishable from any other pale shape in an infinite gray world — and, by her own account, immediately set about trying to die again. Not out of despair, she was always careful to specify, correcting me gently whenever I misunderstood this part of the story in the early years of knowing her. Out of consistency. She had made a decision, in life, about what her existence was for, and had discovered that the decision held true even here, on the other side of everything. If there was truly nothing left to search for, then there was nothing here for her either, and she saw no reason to pretend otherwise simply because the scenery had changed.

I revived her, eventually, almost by accident — a Soul Fragment spent on impulse, on a stranger, before I had fully decided whether I meant to spend it at all. She woke furious. She has told this part of the story to me a dozen times since, always with the exact same aggrieved, theatrical outrage, as if the injustice of it has not diminished one single degree across however many years have passed. Some plant-turned-man, she likes to say, had undone her careful, deliberate ending not once but twice — first in Something, and then again, more insultingly, in Nothing itself, where she had at least expected the courtesy of being allowed to stay dead.

"I was fully intending to die again," she told me, that same unguarded night, "the very next time a Mission came up. I had it planned. I resented you enormously for making me wait even that long."

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