The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

8.1 — Still Alive, Still Burned

The blind man was, against every reasonable expectation the scene should have offered, still alive. Burned badly — the semidivine woman's flame had done real and lasting damage before Eremos ever reached him — but alive, breath rasping shallow and uneven in a chest that had somehow, through whatever stubbornness keeps a mortal body clinging to itself past the point sense would recommend, refused to stop yet.

He could not see the aftermath around him. He had never been able to see anything. But he could feel it — the absence of the eight presences that had, for so long, filled that Fragment with a particular and terrible pressure, and the presence, instead, of something standing very near him now that felt like neither the gentle young man he'd betrayed nor the gods who'd used him. He said nothing. There was, perhaps, nothing left in him capable of asking for the mercy or the punishment that felt, in that moment, equally deserved and equally out of his reach to request.

8.2 — The Word She Never Expected to Hear Again

By the time Eremos turned back toward her, something in him had already begun, slowly, to soften — not erasing what had happened, not undoing the fury that had carried him through eight lives in as many breaths, but folding back, the way a wave folds back from a shore it has already finished reshaping, into something that could, once again, hold gentleness alongside grief without either one canceling the other out. The blue fractures along his skin dimmed by slow degrees, the shadow at his shoulders drawing back into its familiar, ordinary quiet, until what stood in the ruined yard was, once more, unmistakably him.

He looked, when she finally made herself meet his eyes, almost entirely like himself again — the same warm brown, the same low blue flame, the shadow at his shoulders receding until it was only ever the familiar, private quirk of light it had always been. But something in his face had changed permanently, in a way she understood, even in her own shock, she was one of only a very few people who would ever be allowed to see.

Did you know this story is from NovelFire? Read the official version for free and support the author.

"Mama," he said.

It was the first time he had ever called her that aloud. She had heard him say thank you, and I'll come find you when the mission clears, and once, quietly, half-asleep by the kitchen fire, something that might have been I love you dressed carefully in smaller words so neither of them would have to carry the full weight of it. She had never once heard him say the word she had, in the privacy of her own ruined heart, been calling him for months without ever telling him so.

She did not remember crossing the space between them. She remembered only that she was in his arms, and that he held her the way he had never once, in all their months together, needed to hold anyone — carefully, as though she might still shatter, though the only thing left breaking in that moment was the last wall she'd built around her own grief. She wept the way she had not allowed herself to weep since the very first night the eight of them arrived in her life — not from the pain, though the pain was real and would take its own long time to heal, but from the specific, overwhelming relief of being held by someone who had chosen, of his own will and at whatever cost it carried him, to come back for her exactly as promised.

"I'm here," he said, into her hair, and did not let go for a very long time.

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