The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

The question came later, once the meal was nearer to finished than not, the broth simmering slow and fragrant, the bread finally freed from its cloth and set to cool near the hearth's edge — a quiet stretch where the five of us had drifted, without much discussion, into a loose half-circle around the fire, waiting on the last of it.

It was Flora who asked it, unsurprisingly, since curiosity has always moved through her more openly than through anyone else I know — she has so little practice yet at holding a question back once it's arrived.

"Can I ask you something," she said, from where she sat cross-legged near the hearth, hugging her knees, "about before. Before you were — this." A small gesture, taking in the whole of me, the shape I wear now. "I keep thinking about it, since I met you. We were the same thing, once. Both of us. Plants. Quiet. Waiting for light we couldn't reach on our own." She hesitated, glancing briefly at the others, as though checking whether the question was allowed in front of them, and finding, in their attentive silence, permission to continue. "But you're so different from me. Even now, knowing what I know about how it was for you — you moved through all of it so much sooner than I did. You found words. You found a body. I didn't do any of that on my own at all. Someone had to build almost all of it for me, patiently, one piece at a time. Why was there so much difference between us? If we started the same way?"

The clearing went quiet at that in a particular way — not awkward, exactly, but attentive, the kind of quiet that gathers around a question everyone present understands matters more than its plain wording lets on.

I was silent for a long moment, turning the question over, feeling the old, familiar weight of it settle somewhere behind my ribs — a weight I've carried, in one form or another, since long before I ever learned the word for what I used to be.

"I don't fully know," I said, finally, and it was true, in the particular way that only the oldest, least examined truths of a person's life are true — known intimately in shape, and almost entirely unexamined in cause. "I've asked myself that question more times than I can count, Flora. Longer than you've existed, probably. I know I was a Void Plant, same as you say you were, before any of this. I know I spent — I don't even have a number for how long, time doesn't hold its shape properly across that kind of stretch — rooted, silent, watching light I couldn't turn myself fully toward. The same as you did. I know that somewhere in there, I found movement before you did. Words before you did. This body, eventually, before you did. But the why of it — why one of us found the door faster than the other — I don't have an answer I trust yet."

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

"Do you have a guess?" Vesalia asked, quietly, from across the fire, her own curiosity plainly caught now alongside Flora's.

"I have several," I admitted. "None I'm confident enough in to hand to anyone as truth. There's a version where it has something to do with who was watching me, all those years — someone loved me, patiently, the whole time I couldn't respond, and maybe that mattered more than I've ever let myself credit. There's another version where it's simpler and colder than that — maybe some plants are just built to reach the door sooner than others, the same arbitrary way some seeds sprout before others planted in the very same season, for reasons that have nothing to do with worth or love or waiting harder. I don't know which version is true. Maybe neither is. Maybe it's something else again, something I haven't found the shape of yet."

Flora nodded slowly, some of the tension in her shoulders easing at the honesty of the answer, even without the certainty she might have hoped for. "That's a strange thing to still not know," she said, "about your own beginning."

"It is," I agreed. "I've made a kind of peace with it, mostly. Some stories don't finish all at once. Some of them you have to grow into understanding, the same slow way you grew into everything else."

Ilyrisse, across the fire, was watching me with an expression I recognized — the particular quiet stillness she wears when a question matters to her more than she's willing to say plainly in front of others, a stillness I've learned, across our whole shared history, to read as closely as any words she might have chosen instead.

"You've never told me the rest of it either," she said, softly. "Not all of it. I've always assumed you would, eventually, when you were ready."

"I will," I said, and looked at Flora as I said it, because some part of the promise, I realized, belonged to her most of all tonight, the two of us bound by the same old silence in a way none of the others quite shared. "I'll tell you. All of you, if you want it — but you especially, Flora, since you asked, and since you already understand more of what the question costs than anyone else here possibly could. Just — not tonight. Tonight is for this." I gestured, loosely, at the fire, the simmering broth, the five of us gathered close around it. "I'll tell you properly, one day soon, when it's just the two of us, and I can give the story the whole of my attention instead of only half of it."

Flora considered that for a long moment, and then nodded, something settled and patient in her expression that hadn't been there when she'd first asked. "I can wait," she said. "I'm good at waiting. It's the one thing I've always been good at."

"I know," I said, gently. "I remember."

The fire crackled on, unhurried, and the question sat there among us, honestly unanswered, in a way that felt, for once, entirely all right to leave exactly as it was.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!