The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Now, Iris went on, settling back into the shape of the story, this being grew fond of a toy. The way you've grown fond of Eremos, she said, and something in Flora's face shifted at the comparison — not offense, only the particular attentive stillness that settles over her whenever a story reaches for something close enough to her own life to matter.

And evil knew one thing, Iris said: the toy was interesting. That was reason enough. That has always been reason enough, for a being large enough to want without needing a justification attached to the wanting. So evil wanted the toy.

It did not want the toy the way a child wants a plaything, Iris said, correcting herself before Flora could misunderstand — not something to be picked up and set down again once its novelty wore thin. It wanted it the way you might want the very first warm thing you'd ever touched, after living an unmeasured span of existence with nothing warm anywhere close enough to reach. Once evil had found it, it could not quite remember, however hard it tried, what the shape of wanting had felt like before the toy existed to be wanted.

But having the toy caused something. A chain of consequences reaching forward into the future — the toy itself dangerous, though evil, in its total and unshakable certainty of its own power, did not think much of that danger at first. It did not need to. Nothing, in the whole of its existence, had ever once been strong enough to threaten it back.

And then, one day, out of nowhere in particular, evil noticed something. The timeline — the specific one we are telling you about right now, the one belonging to the Chronicle of the Last Bloom itself — had changed. Shifted, in some small, precise, and entirely unauthorized way. And because of evil's own intervention with the toy, the toy had absorbed some of evil's own abilities, in whatever manner such things absorb, gradually, invisibly, the way heat moves from one hand into another simply by staying in contact long enough. And if it kept absorbing — if nothing intervened — it would eventually explode.

Evil was not worried, not at first. It understood, better than anything else in existence, that the toy could not actually harm it. Nothing could harm it. That has always been the plain, unglamorous truth underneath its every other quality. But evil remembered something else, something that complicated the whole comfortable certainty of that fact: it had not grown fond of only this one toy. There were others — other small, precious things it had discovered while playing with the first, drawn in slowly the way affection tends to widen once it's found a single foothold worth keeping. A whole small constellation of things it had, without quite meaning to, come to care about, the way a single candle lit in a dark room eventually reveals, once your eyes adjust, that the room was never actually as empty as it first appeared.

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

Evil itself would not be harmed by whatever the toy eventually became. But it would also, it realized, be entirely unable to stop the toy, once the moment came, because the toy would be wielding the very same abilities evil itself had once wielded, undiminished, unblunted, turned back against the world evil had spent an unimaginable span of time quietly arranging to its own satisfaction. And unlike evil, those smaller, dearer things it had gathered around itself — those it very much could lose. Those, the toy could unmake without difficulty, without hesitation, without evil having any way at all of standing between them and whatever the explosion eventually became.

Because evil can see the past, the future, and the present all at once, it considered, calmly, the plainest solution available to it: kill the present, to prevent whatever future was coming. It is, Iris said, the simplest kind of arithmetic there is — remove the variable before the variable removes everything else. But it suffered, turning that thought over, at the specific idea of killing its favorite toy with its own hands. It turned the thought over for what might have been centuries, or might have been the length of a single held breath, since time, for a being that stands inside all three tenses at once, does not measure itself the way it measures itself for the rest of us. It considered, in the same breath, simply dying itself, removing the whole unbearable problem by removing the one thing capable of caring about the outcome at all. But there was nothing in existence strong enough to kill it. There never had been. It suffers eternally instead, carrying a weight it cannot set down and cannot end, forced to hold, forever, the one thing it has ever wanted enough to fear losing, in the whole of whatever conscious span it has existed across.

I don't think this account can properly tell you how much evil loved that toy. Words fall short of it. I've tried, telling you this much already, and I don't think I've come close.

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