The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

The first strike wasn't a blow at all. Eremos felt it land somewhere behind his own ribs, a sudden borrowed cold spreading out from nothing he could see or block — the ghost-memory of a wound, sharp and specific, the particular ache of a spear he no longer carried but had never quite stopped flinching from on cold days. He staggered half a step before he understood what had actually happened: the man hadn't touched him. Hadn't needed to. Something in him had simply reached, unseen, for whatever Eremos still carried folded away inside himself, and pulled.

"There it is," the man said, not quite pleased, not quite disappointed — cataloguing, the way you'd catalogue the results of an experiment you already half-expected to succeed. "You do feel things. That's more than I can say for most of what I've tried this on out here."

Eremos didn't answer. He was already moving, closing the distance rather than retreating from it, because he had learned, across a great many missions that had taught him a great deal more about fighting than any single power ever had, that distance was exactly what an opponent like this wanted to keep. The ground answered him the way ground had answered him for longer than he could properly account for — not obedient exactly, nothing so tame as command, but familiar, the particular loose intimacy a plant-souled thing kept with anything rooted, anything grown, even secondhand, even borrowed from a Fragment that wasn't his own. A tangle of pale, wiry growth surged up out of the featureless gray beneath the man's feet, fast enough that the man's easy, unhurried confidence flickered, for the first time, into something that had to actually think about where to put his weight next.

He cleared it. Not gracefully — a hard, scrambling leap that cost him some of the composure he'd walked in with — but he cleared it, and Eremos understood, watching him land, that this had been closer to a real test than he'd expected the opening exchange to be.

He did not press the advantage the way he might have, against someone he genuinely believed was dangerous. He held back, deliberately, the way he'd learned to hold back against any opponent whose full measure he hadn't yet taken — not out of mercy exactly, though there was some of that too, old habit from centuries of missions where the person swinging at him turned out, more often than anyone liked to admit, to be someone grieving something rather than someone genuinely worth fighting in earnest. He gave the man perhaps a third of what he actually had. It should have been more than enough.

It wasn't.

The man came back at him faster than the leap should have left room for, one ringed hand snapping out toward Eremos's own wrist — and Eremos felt, an instant before contact, his own pulse answer something that had no business commanding it, a thick, sluggish drag settling into his blood like cold honey poured somewhere it didn't belong. He wrenched his arm free before the man's fingers closed, more instinct than calculation, and felt the sluggishness recede as the contact broke, leaving behind only the unpleasant, lingering awareness of exactly how close that grip had come to actually landing.

"Blood," Eremos said, understanding arriving a beat behind the danger the way it usually did with him, patient by nature even when patience cost him. "You reach for blood."

"Among other things." The man circled, unhurried again despite the leap that should have cost him more composure than it apparently had. "Though I confess I'm surprised you have any left to reach for, out here. Most of what I've tested on this gray nothing of a world doesn't carry a body worth the name."

Eremos didn't answer that either. He was watching, instead — the particular economy of the man's footwork, the way each step landed exactly where the last exchange had left an opening rather than where instinct alone should have carried him, the way his ringed hands kept finding the precise angle that would have closed the distance a half-second faster than Eremos's own guard could account for. He told himself, the first two or three times it happened, that it was simply skill. Ashra, whatever else it had made this man, had apparently made him a genuinely capable fighter, and capable fighters read an opponent's weight and rhythm well enough to anticipate a strike before it fully committed.

He tried something new on the fourth exchange — not vines this time, but stillness, the old plant-souled trick of going motionless long enough to let an opponent commit fully to a read that would turn out wrong, a technique that had won him more missions across more centuries than any single weapon he'd ever carried. He held it a beat longer than instinct wanted to allow, watching the man's weight shift toward a strike aimed at where Eremos's stillness suggested he'd remain — and at the very last possible fraction of a second, stepped through the opening the man's own commitment had left bare, driving a strike toward the joint of his shoulder that should have, by every law of the exchange Eremos had just built, landed clean.

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The man was not where the commitment should have left him. He had abandoned the strike entirely, mid-motion, in a way that cost him balance and dignity both, throwing himself sideways into an ungainly stumble that any genuinely confident fighter would never have risked unless something had warned him, with total certainty, that continuing forward meant losing something he wasn't willing to lose.

"That," the man said, breathing harder now, some of the polish gone from his voice, "was not a technique I have ever seen before in my life. And yet I knew, the instant you committed to your stillness, precisely what it was building toward." He straightened, eyes narrowing, and for the first time Eremos saw something in his face that was not confidence at all. "I do not appreciate feeling as though I am fighting a stranger I already know the shape of."

"Neither do I," Eremos said, "appreciate being that stranger."

By the fifth exchange, he had stopped being able to tell himself that.

The vines came again, faster this time, a full third of what he'd been holding back finally spent on the effort — and the man was already moving before the growth had fully broken the surface, already stepping into the exact gap the pattern would leave a half-second later, as though he'd watched Eremos do this exact thing a dozen times before and simply knew, with the flat unbothered certainty of long familiarity, precisely where the gap was going to open.

Eremos felt something cold settle under his own ribs that had nothing to do with borrowed pain this time.

He shifted his weight and drove a strike low, toward the man's leading leg, a technique he'd learned so long ago and used so rarely that he genuinely could not remember the mission that had taught it to him — and the man's weight was already off that leg, already redistributed, already three-quarters into the counter that should have cost him a full beat longer to commit to. Not luck. Eremos had spent centuries learning what luck looked like on an opponent's face, the small tell of relief when an instinct paid off against odds the person themselves hadn't been certain of. This man showed none of it. He moved like someone reading from a page he'd already memorized.

"You keep looking at me," the man observed, mid-exchange, circling again, "like you're trying to place my face."

"I'm trying to work out how you know how I fight," Eremos said, plainly, because there was no longer any use pretending the question wasn't the only one that mattered. "You've read every opening I've given you before I've finished giving it. That isn't instinct. That's memory."

Something flickered across the man's expression — not guilt, Eremos noted, filing the distinction away with the same careful attention he gave everything that mattered. Confusion. Genuine, unfeigned, and, for the first time since the fight had begun, entirely unrehearsed.

"I was going to ask you the same question," the man said, slower now, some of the easy confidence finally cracking at its edges. "I have never in my life met you. I would remember. I remember everyone worth remembering, and I have made very certain, across a great many years, that the list stays short." A beat, his ringed hands flexing at his sides, some private calculation working behind his eyes that Eremos could not read the shape of. "And yet every strike I've thrown has landed exactly where you were about to be a half-second before you got there. I assumed, at first, that this was simply what real skill felt like, fighting someone genuinely worth the effort. I am no longer certain that's what this is."

The pause between them stretched, gray and unmarked by any sound at all, both men doing the same private arithmetic and arriving, Eremos suspected, at two very different totals.

He thought, in that pause, of the household — of the possibility, however unlikely, that this was some elaborate, badly-timed prank engineered by one of the women who loved him, a test of nerve dressed up as danger the way Vaelira occasionally dressed her own affection up as chaos. He dismissed the thought almost as quickly as it arrived. They knew what today was. They knew what he was walking toward, and why, and how carefully every one of them had agreed, without argument, to give him the uncontested space to walk toward it. None of them would have spent that agreement on a joke. Whatever this was, it was not a joke, and whoever this man was, he had found Eremos specifically, by some means neither of them could presently account for, and had arrived already knowing, on some level Eremos could not yet name, exactly how to hurt him.

How does he know me.

His mind — root-patient, slow to alarm, built across an age of stillness to consider a problem thoroughly before reacting to it — turned the question over and over and arrived, each time, at the same flat wall. He did not know. He could not know, not with the information he currently had, and the not-knowing itself had started to feel, in the last handful of exchanges, considerably more dangerous than anything the man's blood-cold grip had managed to land.

"Enough," the man said, finally, some decision visibly settling into him. "I don't enjoy fighting something I don't understand nearly as much as I enjoy fighting something I do. Let's find out together which of us actually knows what's happening here."

He came again, faster than every exchange before it combined, both rings flaring with that same sourceless light — and Eremos, watching him come, felt something in his own chest answer the escalation with a cold certainty of its own, quiet and absolute beneath the mounting alarm.

Something is very wrong here, and I am not equipped, as I currently am, to find out what.

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