The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Dravik did not see what happened next so much as he survived being present for it.

The gray around them did not tear, exactly, and it did not burn — nothing so simple, nothing so describable, as either of those two familiar violences. It reordered, all at once, the way a held breath reorders a room the instant it finally releases, every fixed thing in Dravik's immediate sense of up and down and forward quietly, calmly agreeing to answer to a different authority than the one it had answered to a heartbeat before. The featureless distance around them folded inward at its edges, not collapsing so much as arranging itself, gray becoming, for one vertiginous span of time he could not afterward measure with any confidence, something closer to walls — vast, indistinct, gold-veined walls, a hall with no visible ceiling and no visible door, built entirely out of a will that had simply decided a hall belonged here and found the raw substance of Nothing too indifferent, in that moment, to argue back.

He felt his own dominion reach for something to hold onto, out of old habit more than calculation, and found nothing there to close his hand around. His blood, ordinarily so obedient, so entirely his to command, sat inert and unresponsive in whatever body the Between still permitted him, as though it, too, had quietly decided to answer to the new authority currently reordering the space around them both.

The Absolute I did not move toward him. It did not need to. Dravik understood, watching it stand at the center of a hall that existed only because it had decided it should, that movement itself belonged to an older, smaller category of threat than whatever this actually was.

It laughed.

Not cruelly, not the way a triumphant enemy laughs over something they've just finished breaking. Something quieter than that, and stranger — a low, genuinely amused sound, the particular laugh of someone who has just watched a very small, very confident creature discover, for the first time, exactly how large the room it had wandered into actually was. It was, in its own way, worse than cruelty would have been. Cruelty, at least, implied Dravik mattered enough to be the point of it.

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"You came a very long way," the Absolute I said, still faintly amused, "to discover that you'd found the wrong king."

Dravik did not remember, afterward, precisely what happened in the handful of moments that followed — only fragments, disordered and half-formed, the way a fever leaves behind pieces of a night rather than the whole of it. A pressure closing around something in him that had nothing to do with his body, gentle and absolute and entirely without malice in the way that a tide has no malice for the sandcastle it's already decided to take back. A sensation he had no name for and hoped, in the moment, never to need one for again — not pain exactly, though it left something in its wake that ached the way pain aches, but closer to editing, some careful, unhurried hand reaching into the specific place where his dominion lived and rearranging what it found there, the way you'd rearrange furniture in a house you'd already decided belonged to you regardless of who currently slept in it.

The gold-veined walls held a long while. He could not have said how long. Time, inside that vast unbothered hall, had apparently agreed to answer to the same authority as everything else.

And then, without any particular announcement, the hall was gone, and the gray featureless distance of the ordinary Between had returned to stand in its place, indifferent and unmarked, as though nothing at all had happened there beyond two men briefly disagreeing about something neither of them had bothered explaining aloud.

Eremos was gone too — walked off, or faded back into whatever quieter version of himself had been waiting underneath the gold ring the whole time, Dravik never saw which, because by the time his own vision had cleared enough to look, there was no one left standing in the gray at all except himself, and whatever the pressure had left behind in the place where his dominion used to sit, warm and certain and entirely his own.

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