The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

My hand touched something with a metallic smell rising off it before my fingers had even fully closed around it — warm, and moving in a way that told me, without needing sight to confirm it, that whatever I'd touched wasn't solid the way stone is solid. It flowed. Slow and thick, the particular resistance of something that wants, in its own reluctant way, to keep being whole even as it's being spilled out of whatever shape had been holding it together a moment before. I felt it cool against my fingers almost as soon as it touched them, air finding it faster than warmth could hold on, and understood, distantly, that whatever this was had only just, in that very instant, stopped being alive.

My hand passed through something else a moment later — I want to be careful here, because I don't think there's a way to describe this that doesn't ask something difficult of you, and I've decided, weighing it against the alternative, that I'd rather ask that of you honestly than pretend the moment away entirely. It was the resistance of a body, and then, abruptly, the absence of that resistance, the particular strange give of something that had a moment before been solid enough to press back against my hand and had simply, in the space of a heartbeat, stopped being solid at all. There was a sound that went with it, wet and short, gone before I could properly finish hearing it, and then only the faint drag of something settling, unresisting, onto ground already too soaked to take much more.

I felt my own feet moving, fast, faster than I think I'd ever moved this body before, the ground shifting texture beneath each step — packed earth, and then something wetter, something that clung a little longer to the sole of my foot than dry ground had any business clinging, and then, once, briefly, the specific unmistakable roundness of something that should never have been underfoot at all, gone again before I could let myself understand it properly. My own breathing, when I noticed it at all, came fast and even, entirely unbothered by the pace my legs had set for it, as though whatever was moving me had no more need of rest than the wind does.

There was heat radiating from somewhere close to my own chest, though I couldn't tell you whether it came from within me or from something I'd only just passed near — a low, steady warmth, entirely unlike the dry, practical heat of the cauterizing fire I'd noticed earlier from my knees. This warmth felt closer to breath. Closer, if I'm honest, to something almost like a heartbeat, though I couldn't have told you, in that moment, whether it belonged to the thing wearing my body or to something else entirely, moving somewhere just beneath the surface of it, patient, waiting its own turn.

There was laughter. I want to tell you about the laughter, because I think it frightened me more than almost anything else that morning, more even than the axe, more than the smell, more than the specific give of a body losing its resistance beneath my own hand. It came from my own throat, and it was not my laugh — deep, and delighted in a way that had nothing gentle left inside it, the particular unrestrained sound of something that had been waiting a very long time to be given a reason to laugh like that, and had finally, that morning, been handed one. It went on for longer than any laugh I'd ever heard, mine or otherwise, rising and falling with no apparent concern for whether anyone nearby wanted to keep hearing it.

Around the laughter, other sounds arrived and receded — screaming, first, in several directions at once, and then, gradually, less of it. Voices calling out for help in words I half recognized and half didn't. The particular, specific sound of men who had been begging only a moment before falling suddenly, entirely silent as whatever was moving through that place reached them, one after another, the silence somehow louder, in its own way, than anything that had preceded it.

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I felt things strike my body — small, sharp impacts, arriving from a distance, the unmistakable rhythm of arrows finding their mark. And I want to tell you honestly that I don't know whether they hurt. I don't know whether they did anything at all, in fact, beyond announce themselves with that single sharp impact and then simply stop existing as a concern a moment later, the way you might notice rain landing on a coat thick enough not to need noticing it further. A body that an axe couldn't break — did arrows manage anything more against it? I genuinely don't know. I've turned the question over more times than I could count in the years since, and I still can't tell you with any confidence whether I simply didn't feel it, or whether there was, in that moment, nothing left of me capable of feeling it at all.

I heard the kneeling men as I passed among them, or near them — not screaming any longer, most of them, but a different sound entirely, one I understood only slowly, turning it over the way I'd turned over so much else that morning. They stopped pleading. Not because whatever moved through them stopped needing mercy, I don't think, but because something in each of them recognized, in whatever instant I drew close enough to be recognized, that pleading no longer had anywhere left to go. The silence that followed each of them was its own kind of sound, distinct from the ordinary quiet of the place before any of this had begun — a held, complete silence, the specific absence you only ever notice once you've spent long enough surrounded by its opposite.

Somewhere beneath my own feet, or beside them, I heard metal meeting metal — a blade raised against whatever was moving through that place, and then the particular high, singing note of that same blade failing, shattering the way the very first axe had shattered against me, over and over, each attempt sounding a little more desperate than the one before it, until eventually no more attempts came at all.

The smell thickened as the sounds thinned — dense, now, in a way it hadn't been even at its worst before, death and blood and organ and things I won't name more precisely than that, filling whatever lungs this body still had use of until breathing itself became its own small, deliberate labor. Smoke found its way into it too, somewhere near the end, sharp and acrid, though I couldn't have told you what had caught, or why, only that the air itself seemed to grow heavier with every step, thick enough to taste as much as to breathe, bitter and close at the back of my throat.

And beneath the thickness of it, beneath the laughter and the silence and the arrows that may or may not have mattered, I felt something else beginning, slow and unmistakable — tiredness. Real tiredness, heavier than anything I'd felt on my knees earlier that same morning, pulling at whatever was left of me the way sleep pulls at anything that has finally, finally been allowed to stop. My own limbs, when I noticed them again, felt distant, borrowed even more thoroughly than they had felt at the very start of all this, as though whatever had been moving me had begun, by slow degrees, to set the weight of them back down into my own keeping, one small unfamiliar piece at a time.

The screaming had nearly stopped entirely by the time I felt my own legs slow their pace. The laughter had gone quiet somewhere before that, without my noticing exactly when. And the last thing I remember, before the fog took the rest of it away from me entirely, was the specific, growing weight of wanting, more than I think I had ever wanted anything in all my long, rooted, patient existence, simply to sleep.

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