The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

"There's something nobody explains to you about the souls of this world," Eremos began, without opening his eyes, as if it were easier to talk about this in the darkness behind his own eyelids than facing something so true head-on. "When a body dies in Something, what arrives here isn't the whole person. It's what's left. The pieces that survived the journey."

Flora listened in silence. She knew, better than most, what it meant to arrive in this world incomplete — she had arrived without even language, an empty silhouette repeating the only gesture her plant-nature still remembered. But she said nothing. She let him build his own way of explaining it.

"Imagine a soul like a thread," he went on. "Not the Heartthread, not that kind of thread. A simpler, more fragile one: the thread that holds together all the fragments of who a person was. Memories, guilt, tenderness, everything that made them who they were. In most souls that thread is thick. It's woven from a whole lifetime of good things and bad things, and even when it strains, it holds."

He paused. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped a tone, as if he were about to say something he hadn't said aloud in a long time.

"But there are souls where that thread is thin. Very thin. Because the life that holds it up didn't give them enough material to weave it thick. Because no one loved them well enough, soon enough, and all they have to hold themselves together is the little they managed to build on their own, by force, when it was already almost too late."

"Vesalia," Flora said, not as a question, but as someone confirming something she was already beginning to understand.

"Vesalia," he repeated. "And here's the part nobody fully understands, not even me, even though I've seen her closer than anyone: a thin thread doesn't mean a weak soul. It means a soul that's had to hold itself up with very little, for a very long time, and has learned to do it so well that from the outside no one notices how fine the material is. Vesalia wasn't fragile. She was, perhaps, the strongest person I've known in my entire existence. But strong and whole aren't the same word. You can be immensely strong and, at the same time, held up by a single thread that never stopped hurting, even though it never fully broke."

Flora frowned, not in confusion, but with that concentration of hers when trying to fully understand something important.

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"So this story isn't about the thread breaking."

"No," Eremos said, and there was something like relief in his voice at having been understood without needing to explain everything. "It's about a night when it came close. And about why, even after finding me, even after I loved her and she let herself be loved, that thread stayed just as thin as it was the first day she arrived here."

He sat up a little, just enough to look at Flora directly, because what came next he wanted to tell without hiding behind the darkness of his own eyelids.

"To understand this you have to understand something else, something that took me a long time to accept about her, and that I might take longer still to fully explain to you: there are people no one ever taught how to love without conditions. Not because they didn't want to learn. But because no one taught them first. And those people, even when they finally find someone who loves them well, truly, with no trick or calculation behind it — they keep waiting for the blow. They keep counting, in secret, every way that this too could end."

"Did she do that? With you?"

"She did that with me," Eremos confirmed, without bitterness, only the quiet sadness of someone who has made peace with a truth he can't fully change. "Not because she doubted me. But because her body, what's left of a body when one is a soul, didn't yet know how to stop expecting the fall. She'd been betrayed twice in life — the man who claimed to love her, the gods who claimed to guide her — and something in her, something reason couldn't even reach, had decided the third time was only a matter of time."

Flora was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke, her voice carried that bare honesty that defined her, the same honesty that had made her say aloud, months earlier, that she needed to feel in her body what she already knew in her heart.

"I do that too, sometimes," she said, very softly. "Not with you. But... sometimes I wonder if I deserve to be here. If one day you'll look at me and realize I'm just a plant that learned to talk late."

Eremos reached out and touched her cheek, with the same thoughtful tenderness he touched everything he considered, though he never called it that, sacred.

"That's why I want to tell you this story," he said. "Because you, better than anyone, will understand what it means to carry a fear that reason can't take apart. And because I want you to know, before I tell you how bad that night got, that things ended well. Not perfect. Well."

Flora nodded, and settled a little closer, without lying down yet — she wanted, as she'd said at the start, to keep watching his face.

"Tell me," she said. "From the beginning."

And Eremos, eyes open now, fixed on some point in the starless sky of the Fragment, began to unspool the thread of memory.

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