The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Ilyrisse fell asleep first, which almost never happened -- she was, by nature and by centuries of hard-earned habit, the last one awake in any room she occupied, the one who kept watch even when there was nothing left in this quiet world worth watching for. But grief, once fully spoken, has a way of exhausting a person more thoroughly than almost anything else, and tonight it had finally caught up with her.

Vaelira lay still beneath her, one arm draped protectively across Ilyrisse's back, watching the slow, even rise and fall of her breathing with an attention she rarely gave to anything that wasn't actively trying to bore her.

I am going to get him back for this, she thought, with the particular petulant sincerity she reserved for grudges she fully intended to keep. He goes off on his missions, gathers half the lost and lonely souls in this entire gray, endless world, brings them home to love, and leaves the actual work of holding them together to the rest of us. I did not sign up to be anyone's emotional caretaker. I signed up to sleep for centuries and occasionally be annoyed by an idiot plant-man who wouldn't stop reviving people.

It was not, she knew even as she thought it, remotely true -- not the resentment, at least. She had never once regretted a single moment spent tangled up in this family Eremos had built without ever quite meaning to build it. But the joke was easier to hold onto than the alternative, which was the much larger, much more inconvenient truth sitting directly beneath it: that she loved Ilyrisse. Not only as an extension of loving Eremos, not only as a fellow soul bound to the same strange constellation. On her own terms. For her own reasons. In a way that had nothing borrowed about it at all.

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That wasn't an excuse for anything. Vaelira was clear-eyed enough, even half-drowsy with the weight of a sleeping woman on her chest, to know that loving someone didn't make the work of holding them any lighter, or any less hers to do. It simply meant she'd do it anyway, gladly, the way she was doing it now -- one hand moving in slow, absent circles against Ilyrisse's back, keeping watch over a woman who almost never let herself be watched over by anyone at all.

Still, she thought, settling deeper into the crystal floor's warmth, eyes finally beginning to drift shut of their own accord, he owes me for this. He owes all of us, honestly. I intend to collect. Eventually. When I feel like it.

She was asleep within minutes, her breathing falling, without either of them noticing, into the exact same slow rhythm as Ilyrisse's.

The castle held them both without complaint, the way it always did -- the same crystal that had once seemed, to Ilyrisse in her earliest days here, like a monument to her own isolation, a beautiful cage built for a woman who had forgotten how to be anything but alone, now simply a house with two women asleep in it, warm and tangled and entirely unremarkable in the particular way that only the truest kind of safety ever manages to be. The high glass ceiling caught the Fragment's soft, sourceless dusk and held it there, unmoving, the way it had held that same light every night since Ilyrisse first raised these walls out of nothing more than memory and grief and a stubborn, half-buried hope that something in her still knew how to build rather than merely rule.

Somewhere in one of the far towers, unused tonight, one of the guest wings sat quiet and unlit -- Flora's, though neither woman sleeping in the crystal hall below would have known to call it that. It waited the way all the guest wings waited, patient and undemanding, ready for whichever soul in Eremos's long constellation next needed a door that opened without asking anything of them first.

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