The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Movement One — What the Between Does to a Searching Man

The Between does not make searching easy, and it does not apologize for that.

Eremos had crossed more of it than almost any soul alive could claim, in one form or another, across missions numbering somewhere past the count he'd stopped bothering to keep — and even he had never once found a shortcut through its particular cruelty, which was simply this: the world was too large, too gray, too endlessly, indifferently the same in every direction, for a search without a map to ever feel like anything other than an act of faith. He had walked stretches of it that held nothing at all — no fences, no roads, no looping fragments of some stranger's unfinished afternoon, just flat colorless distance going on long enough that a person could start to doubt, quietly and reasonably, whether they themselves were still moving at all.

He had been walking three days like that, since the household had given him what they'd started calling, without any of them quite deciding to name it that on purpose, his day — one day, freely offered, no questions asked, no turn traded away to make room for it, because every one of them had understood, without needing it explained twice, what it meant to him and why he needed it uncontested. Ilyrisse had kissed his forehead before he left and told him, in the particular careful voice she used for things she wasn't sure she had the right to say, that she hoped whatever he found brought him peace, whichever shape peace turned out to take. Vaelira had said nothing at all, which from her was its own kind of blessing.

He was looking for a girl who did not have a name he could ask after, in a Between built to swallow names whole even when a person had one to give.

He did not know, walking, whether Briar had survived whatever happened to a soul once her mission-Fragment closed around her a second time — whether she'd been pulled back into the ordinary silhouette-shape every soul wore out here, featureless and faceless and impossible to distinguish from ten thousand others exactly like her. He did not know whether she remembered him at all, in whatever form memory took for a soul that young, that recently taught how to want things. He did not know if she was even still here, in the sense that mattered — whether some later mission had swallowed her the way missions occasionally swallowed a soul whole, or whether some later stretch of Between had simply worn away whatever fragile new self she'd built on that one small street until there was nothing left of it to search for.

He knew none of that. He walked anyway. He had learned, across a very long life, that a promise did not require certainty in order to be binding — only intention, and the stubbornness to keep walking toward it long after certainty had stopped being available.

He passed other souls, here and there, across those three days — the ordinary featureless kind, silhouettes drifting alone or in loose, wary clusters, none of them looking at him any longer than they looked at anything else, the particular incurious exhaustion of beings who had learned, the hard way, that strangers in the Between were rarely worth the risk of hoping about. He did not stop most of them. He had learned, from centuries of searching for one soul in particular before he ever found her, that stopping every stranger to ask the same unanswerable question wore a person down faster than the walking itself did.

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It was on the third day that he started thinking, properly, about how strange it was that he so rarely saw anyone with real power out here.

There was a moment, on the second day, that he had not told anyone about since, and did not expect he ever would.

A silhouette had crossed his path at a distance — small, slight, moving with a particular halting uncertainty that some part of him recognized before the rest of him had caught up to the recognition — and he had closed the gap between them faster than he'd closed distance for almost anything in longer than he cared to measure, his own pulse doing something loud and undignified in his chest the entire way.

It was not her. He understood that the moment he was close enough to see clearly — an ordinary silhouette, featureless the way every ordinary arriving soul was featureless, with none of the faint, insistent shape Briar's had carried even in that very first hour on the road. He had stopped a respectful distance off anyway, and said nothing, and let the stranger continue on whatever private errand had brought them across his path, because there was no version of the moment that ended well if he tried to explain, to someone who had no idea who he was, why a total stranger had just sprinted half a mile toward them with his heart in his throat.

He had sat down, after, in the gray nowhere the stranger left behind, and given himself the length of one long unhurried breath to feel the whole disappointment of it before he made himself stand and keep walking. He had learned, across centuries of searching for Ilyrisse before he ever found her, that grief of that particular shape — hope curdling fast and completely into its opposite, over and over, at every silhouette that briefly resembled the one you wanted — was not something you could search a very large world without eventually meeting head-on, more than once. He had hoped, walking away from that second false alarm, that this particular search might somehow be gentler than that one had been.

It was on the third day that he started thinking, properly, about how strange it was that he so rarely saw anyone with real power out here.

He knew, intellectually, the way anyone who'd lived long enough in the Between eventually came to know it, that souls capable of real strength — the kind that could fold a scrap of raw Nothing into something livable, the kind that could hold a World Fragment or come close to holding one — were not common, and were not, as a rule, found wandering the open gray distance the way ordinary drifting silhouettes were. They collected, instead, into corners. Distant, quiet corners of the Between that most souls never heard rumor of, let alone found — not hidden exactly, nothing in the Between's architecture actively concealed them, but simply far, and largely uninteresting to advertise, the way a mountain doesn't announce itself to people who never had reason to look up. Ilyrisse's castle was one such corner. Vaelira's old solitary drifting, before Eremos had disturbed it, had been another. He himself, he supposed, had become one, somewhere along the way, without ever quite noticing the moment it happened.

Most souls lived and died — or whatever the Between's version of dying eventually amounted to — without ever once laying eyes on someone who could do more than survive their own missions competently. It was, Eremos thought, walking through yet another stretch of featureless gray with no landmark to aim himself toward beyond his own stubbornness, one of the Between's quieter mercies. A world built almost entirely out of ordinary, struggling, grieving souls, with its handful of genuinely dangerous exceptions tucked away in corners far enough removed that the ordinary majority rarely had to reckon with what real power, wielded without restraint, actually looked like up close.

He did not know, walking, that this particular mercy was about to run out for him specifically, several hours before nightfall never quite arrived.

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