The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Woof — An Introduction

Hi. I am Big Doggie.

As my name says, I am a dog. A big dog, and — I would like this noted for the record, right at the start, before anyone tries to argue with me about it — a cute one too. Not the most modest way to introduce myself, I know. But modesty has never once helped anybody tell a good story, and I intend to tell you a very good one.

So. Let's get started.

Can you see him? The man whose whole existence, right now, is currently stuck somewhere behind his own enormous nose. I won't give you his name. I won't give you a single other detail about him either, not yet — not because I'm being stingy with you, but because his name isn't the point of him, not today. Today, he's simply the door I'm going to use to show you a little bit of our world. Every world needs a door. He happens to be mine.

Big Doggie is breaking the fourth wall today, because today, for reasons that are entirely my own business, I am omnipotent. So watch him for a couple of seconds. Or, if you'd rather, close your eyes fast and count to three. Either way works. I'm not picky about how you receive your miracles.

Okay. Now you can open your eyes again.

The life of people is short. This particular man is dead now — died of old age, died the way most people eventually die, worn down slowly by the same bitter, patient arithmetic that this world always offers everyone in the end, whether they're ready for the bill or not. Now, listen to me closely, because this next part matters: he died, so what happens now? Let me tell you. Now he's going to travel to the afterlife — a place we call the Between. What is the Between? Big Doggie will explain. Just don't be impatient with me. Good stories take exactly as long as they take.

What Everyone Wants, and What They Get Instead

When you're alive, you have a body. You can feel touch. You can kiss someone you love. You can sit at a warm family dinner and simply enjoy the evening, the way people do when they're lucky enough to have an evening worth enjoying. And most of us, being alive, want more of that. Always more. More years, more warmth, more time — chasing, eventually, something close to immortality itself. The philosopher's stone was one attempt at it. The Holy Grail was another. Amrita, in certain corners of that same living world, was another still. I won't walk you through every single one of humanity's attempts to cheat the clock — that's a story that belongs to the world of the living, the world you once knew, the world you're currently still standing in, reading this. It isn't my story to tell tonight.

Now. I told you a moment ago that immortality is the thing every living soul chases, one way or another. Here's the first thing that changes, the very instant you cross over into the Between: that particular hunger simply stops making sense.

The World You Came From

Before we go any further, let me clear something up, because I can already feel you wondering about it.

The world where people lived — the world our big-nosed friend just left behind him — can be almost anything. A world of magic, if that's the world you happened to come from. A world of steel and machines, if that's yours instead. A world where the sky answers prayers, or a world where nobody ever thought to ask it anything at all. Big Doggie isn't going to sit here and hand you a full map of every single one of them tonight — that's not what this chapter is for, and honestly, half the fun of a story this size is watching it reveal itself slowly, one soul's history at a time, rather than getting the whole encyclopedia dumped on you before you've even had a chance to get comfortable.

So for now, here's all you actually need to know, and I promise it's enough: in the world of the living, there can be gods. There can be demons. There can be magic thick enough to reshape a kingdom, or miracles, or monsters, or whatever else a particular corner of Something decided to build for itself across however many centuries it had to build with. All of that is real, somewhere, to someone. None of it is off the table.

But the Between doesn't care what you brought with you. That's the part I need you to really sit with. Out here, there are no gods. No demons. None of the old machinery you might have spent a whole lifetime praying to, or fighting, or fearing. Out here, there is only the raw, plain power of the individual soul standing in front of you, and the touchless, gray, indifferent space it happens to be standing in. A god, back in Something, is just another soul once it crosses over here — a soul that used to have worship, and temples, and an old throne propping it up, and none of that survives the crossing. What survives is only whatever that soul actually was, underneath all the propping up. A demon is just another silhouette, same as the rest of us, same as our man with the big nose, wandering around not sure yet what shape it wants to wear.

That doesn't mean nothing here is powerful. Oh, some of these souls are considerably more powerful than you'd ever want to meet on a bad day, and Big Doggie promises you'll meet a few of them before this is over. It only means the power belongs to them now — earned, carried, built — and not handed down from some old throne that doesn't exist on this side of things anymore.

Keep that in your pocket. We'll come back to it.

What is the Between, then, if it isn't the heaven or the hell most living people spend their whole lives imagining they'll eventually earn their way into? There are no flowers here. No trees. No soft clouds waiting to catch you, and no burning lava waiting to punish you either. So what is there, you're probably wondering?

Nothing. That's the honest answer, and I'm not going to dress it up prettier than it deserves. A gray, empty desert, stretching in every direction, where everything you once loved most simply isn't there anymore. Your body doesn't come with you. You're a silhouette now — plain, featureless, pale. Your riches stayed behind in the world of the living, where riches actually mean something.

And your power — here's the part worth listening to carefully, because it's easy to get wrong. It doesn't arrive with you the way it worked back home. No spells ready to cast. No crown, no throne, no army standing behind you. You cross over exactly as empty-handed as everyone else, whatever you used to be. But empty-handed isn't the same as empty. If the soul underneath all that old power was genuinely strong, the shape of that strength crosses over too — a kind of ceiling, waiting, with nothing yet poured into it. Filling it back in is a different matter entirely, and it isn't handed to you for free. More on that soon. For now, just know this: whatever you were, out here, you start from zero, and the only thing that decides whether you climb back up is what you're willing to do about it.

Your friends, your family, wherever they ended up — some entirely different corner of this vast gray sprawl, and there's no telling whether you'll cross paths with them again in the next handful of centuries, or ever, or whether you'll simply lose hope first and dissolve quietly into the gray ground before the reunion ever has the chance to happen.

You can't feel anything. You can't touch anything. And talking to another soul — that's a luxury, not a given.

The Hand That Isn't There

Alright. Let's watch, the two of us together.

You can see the man's soul lifting free of his body now — trying, in its own small and confused way, to simply disappear, the way something instinctively tries to disappear when it doesn't yet understand what it's becoming. And look — there, do you see it? That hand. That hand belongs to Nothing itself. The absence of everything.

It doesn't exist. But you'll tell me you're watching it happen right now with your own two eyes, so surely it does exist? Yes. That's the paradox of this whole world, right there in one small, unassuming gesture: it exists and it doesn't exist, both at once, and that particular contradiction is something simple mortals like the two of us were never really built to understand cleanly.

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Now, me — Big Doggie, this big dog, right here — I understand it. I'm omnipotent today, remember? But explaining something a mind can't fully catch isn't really Big Doggie's style. I'd rather feed it to you a little at a time. Bit by bit. That way, by the time we're finished, you'll have understood more of it than you realize you have.

What You Carry, and What You Owe

Now, having said all that — this isn't a story about what happens while you're still alive. This is a story about what happens after you die. About what you actually carry with you, into all that gray. And I think, if you've been listening carefully so far, you already have a guess: memories. Emotions. Feelings. And a little more than just that, besides.

Sounds like fun so far, doesn't it? It isn't, not entirely, because the Between doesn't hand any of it to you for free. Sometimes, you'll feel a flicker in your chest — a little tug, right under the ribs — and we call that a Mission. It's the thing an individual has to answer, has to complete, in order to keep from disappearing into the gray for good. And here's the part I promised I'd come back to: Missions are also the only place any of that old, empty ceiling I told you about actually gets filled back in. Every Mission you survive hands a little of it back — a memory, a scrap of shape, and, if the soul underneath was ever genuinely strong, a little more of that old strength as well. Nobody gets it back all at once. Nobody gets it back for free, either. You bleed for it, a piece at a time, the same as everyone else out here, however powerful you once were.

And if you decide not to bother? If you'd rather sit still and let the gray hold you, rather than go answer whatever's tugging at your chest? Then you simply stay exactly what you arrived as. Pale. Empty. Whatever ceiling you were born with sits there untouched, forever, because nothing pours itself in on its own. Strength, out here, is never handed down. It's dug up, one Mission at a time, and the digging is the only thing that separates the souls you'll want to avoid from the ones who never quite got around to trying.

Now, here's a fact worth knowing plainly, since I haven't said it outright yet: nobody in the Between simply dies the way people die back in Something — not out in the open gray, not from old age, not from a broken heart. Souls out here fade, when they fade at all, slowly, over a very long time, and even that isn't quite the same thing as dying. But I should be honest with you about one exception, because I don't want to start this whole story off on a lie. Inside a Mission, dying is possible. And when it happens there, nothing of your existence is left behind afterward. Nothing. Not one single trace.

Now look — there's our man with the big nose, arriving in the Between at last. I know you can't actually see him properly. Right now he's only a faceless, featureless silhouette, carrying a little scattered information in whatever passes for his head these days, and the more Missions he answers, the more memories will come back to him, piece by piece, and maybe, if he's patient and a little bit lucky, something more than memories besides.

Why We're Not Starting at the Beginning

We aren't telling you this story from its very first beginning, and I want to explain why, honestly, rather than just skipping past the question the way some storytellers might.

A story told that way — the whole thing, start to finish, in strict order — wouldn't actually be worth telling you. It would be slow. It would be difficult to follow. Frankly, it would be boring, and it would probably depress you a little too, if I sat here and counted out, one by one, the actual number of days a certain lonely plant spent standing in the exact same spot for an entire age of the universe. Nobody wants that story told to them minute by minute. I certainly don't want to be the one telling it that way.

So here's what Big Doggie is going to do instead. I'm going to show you what happened on one single, ordinary day — a day that actually got lived, by actual people — and you're going to hear it from their own mouths, in their own words, exactly as much as needs telling, about how they got here, and about the particular trouble each of them is currently up against.

Why does a mother's grief go on chasing her, even after her own death?

Why does a plant end up strong enough to hurt, and possibly destroy, absolutely everyone?

Why does selfishness keep existing, even once a person already knows better?

Why does time never actually finish healing the wound it's supposed to heal?

Why did the man she loved never once love her back the same way?

Why did a man too foolish to hurt a fly end up destroying an entire world?

Why does death always have to arrive wearing suffering as its escort?

I'm not going to answer any of those for you tonight. That's not my job. My job is only to open the door a crack and let you feel the draft coming through it.

This story is told in a way that reaches for tenderness first, hiding the danger where it can, trying its best not to put too much emphasis on the sharper edges — though I won't lie to you and pretend that's always possible. Sometimes the edges show through anyway. That's simply the nature of the thing.

The Man With the Big Nose, Walking

Now, speaking of our man with the big nose — he's been walking a while now, looking for another soul, any soul, willing to talk with him. Let's hope nothing bad happens to him out there. Let's hope no one tricks him into a Contract he doesn't understand yet. Let's hope he finds his own footing, his own identity, slowly, the way most of us eventually do, if the gray is kind enough to give us the time.

Now, speaking of Contracts and Missions, since I promised you I'd get to them — silhouettes can't touch each other out here. There's no danger in that, or at least, that's how it's always made to look. But Contracts — agreements the Between itself has given its blessing to — those are a different matter entirely. A legal loophole, if you want to call it that, one that can leave a soul suffering considerably more than simple loneliness ever could, more than slowly fading away with no identity left to lose.

We've talked a little about the world so far, you and I. I think there's one more thing worth mentioning before I let this chapter close.

World Fragments. What are they? I haven't actually told you yet, so let me do it properly now: a World Fragment is a sealed-off little pocket of space that imitates the world of the living — somewhere you can feel warmth, feel touch, feel all the things most souls out here simply can't. There are two ways to get yourself one. One way is to be brave enough — as brave as Big Doggie, obviously — to go out and actually earn one, the hard way, on your own two paws, as the rarest possible reward a Mission can hand back to you. The place where a Mission actually happens is a lonely one, built fresh each time and gone again once the Mission ends, but it's also the one place, out here, where you can smell something, and taste something, and feel something real again, even if only for as long as the Mission itself lasts. A World Fragment is different — it's what you get to keep, permanently, on the rare occasion the Between decides you've earned it outright, a pocket of that same warmth that doesn't disappear again once you leave it. Or, if you're luckier than brave, you might simply be handed one some other way, through means this account isn't going to spoil for you tonight.

I'm not going to walk you through how fighting actually works out here. I think it's a much better use of your time if you just keep reading and let the chapter that actually explains it do the explaining, when it comes.

What Big Doggie Thinks This Story Actually Is

Speaking generally, from where Big Doggie sits — going off what a friend of mine has told me about all of this — this story is, above everything else, about the grief each of these people carries. About each individual's own history. About how they're handling it right now, today, in whatever present moment they currently find themselves standing in. And about whether they can still fix what's broken, before it's too late for the fixing to matter. I won't say any more than that. Saying more would be spoiling it, and Big Doggie doesn't spoil surprises for people who haven't asked for them.

This isn't an ordinary story. It isn't an easy one to grasp on the first pass. It isn't a story built for everyone, and it certainly isn't a story built for the faint of heart, because it gets told raw, more often than not — though the author has decided, carefully, where the line sits between telling you a hard truth and simply traumatizing you for the sake of it. A fist doesn't hurt. A dagger doesn't hurt either, even buried to the hilt, not really — not unless there's something considerably deeper, something psychological, waiting underneath the wound to actually make it hurt.

This isn't a story about a protagonist fighting to obtain something. It's a story about a protagonist, and the people around him, fighting simply to keep what they already have. It's a story that lives somewhere in the narrow, uncomfortable space between things told well, things left deliberately untold, things told at greater length than you'd expect, and things told badly on purpose, because the telling itself sometimes needs to wobble a little to feel honest. It puts everyone on the same footing. It weighs everyone on the very same scale.

The man with the big nose matters exactly as much as anyone else you'll meet in these pages. Every single story told here, told in its own particular way, is meant to give you something to sit with afterward. I'm not claiming to hold the one absolute truth of any of it. I'll leave that decision to you, the reader — you get to decide for yourself whether the grief I've shown you tonight, and the grief the characters themselves carry, is something true, or simply a clever narrator's trick, dressed up to win your sympathy a little too easily.

Let the Curtain Open

Let the curtain open, then, as we dive together into the story of the last bloom — a story about fated encounters, about fated characters, about fated readers too, wherever you happen to be sitting as you read this. So let it be.

May the story of the Between be eternal.

Woof.

— End of Chapter Zero —

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