The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

In one dome, there was Flora, and Iris beside her, the two of them talking quietly about what it might mean, someday, to return to Something. I don't know the whole of that conversation. I don't think Iris meant for anyone to know the whole of it, even me, even now, and I've made a private policy, over the years, of respecting the handful of doors that woman keeps deliberately, carefully shut. But I could feel the particular tenderness sitting underneath it, the way you can feel warmth radiating off a stone long after the sun that heated it has already gone down, a residual gentleness that had clearly outlasted whatever specific words had produced it. Flora's hands were moving as she spoke, the way they always move when she's excited about something, small unconscious gestures shaping the air the way a plant reaches for whatever light happens to be nearest, fingers opening and closing around ideas too large for her to hold still, and Iris, beside her, simply watched those hands the way you'd watch something you'd decided, long ago, was worth protecting without ever once needing to say so aloud.

In another, there was Eremos, and Iris, together, in an act this account isn't going to name or describe any further than that. I trust you can fill in whatever shape suits your own imagination, and I trust, too, that you'll understand why I'm not the one who's going to do the filling in on your behalf tonight — some rooms, even I leave the door closed on, and I'd like you to notice that, given how rarely I extend that particular courtesy to anyone, including you.

In another, there was Vesper, at a shared meal, Iris having more or less forced the poor woman into a chair long enough to actually eat something, the particular stubborn, sisterly insistence Iris brings to caring for people who'd rather not admit they need caring for at all — a hand set firmly on a shoulder, not unkindly, but with the specific immovability of someone who has already decided this argument is finished before it's properly begun. Vesper looked, in that memory, exactly as put-upon as you'd expect a woman like her to look, being fussed over against her will, arms crossed, mouth set in the particular flat line of someone performing resentment she doesn't entirely feel — and exactly as secretly grateful for it, underneath the put-upon expression, as you'd also expect, if you know her at all by now, the way a person who has spent too long taking care of everyone else occasionally needs, whether she'd ever admit it, someone willing to simply insist on taking care of her instead.

In another, Iris was needling Ilyrisse about something — I couldn't quite make out what, from where I stood, though knowing the two of them, it was almost certainly something that made the Empress go faintly, helplessly pink around the ears, the particular color that woman only ever produces when someone has managed to catch her feeling something she hadn't planned to let show. I do love that particular shade on her. I've told her so, more than once, usually at exactly the moment guaranteed to deepen it, because I find very little in this long existence more satisfying than watching someone who has spent centuries perfecting composure lose a small, harmless piece of it in front of people who love her regardless.

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There were a great many more than that. Dozens. Perhaps more than dozens — I confess I stopped counting somewhere along the way, the way you eventually stop counting stars once you've accepted there are simply too many of them to hold in one sitting, and the counting itself starts to feel like missing the point of looking up in the first place. Small domestic moments, mostly. A meal here. A quiet conversation there. An argument settled, or not quite settled, over whose turn it actually was to do something no one particularly wanted to do — I caught a glimpse of one that appeared to involve the correct method for folding a particular blanket, argued over with the specific, disproportionate intensity people only ever bring to disputes that were never actually about the blanket at all. The ordinary, unglamorous texture of a household that has, against every reasonable expectation this gray world ever offered any of them, learned how to simply be a family — not a garrison, not a court, not a careful arrangement of alliances dressed up as affection, but a family, in every unremarkable, occasionally tedious, entirely irreplaceable sense the word has ever been allowed to carry.

And then there was one more, tucked in among all the rest, that I want to describe to you a little more carefully than the others, because I think it's the one that actually explains why I'm telling you any of this at all tonight. In it, there was a single individual, reading something — reading, as it happened, exactly the words Iris had decided, in her own quiet and deliberate way, to allow that individual to know. And beside the reader, there was a narrator. Writing those very same words down, as they were being lived, as they were being read, all at the very same moment, the three separate instants of living and writing and reading collapsed, somehow, into one continuous, overlapping present, the way three notes struck at once become, for the ear listening to them, a single chord rather than three separate sounds.

Here's where the distance between you, the reader, and this novel you're currently holding gets a little thinner than either of us is probably comfortable with. She knows. She has eyes even in the world you're sitting in right now, wherever that happens to be, whatever hour it is on your end of things, whatever chair or bed or train seat currently holds the weight of you while you hold the weight of this. Break of the fourth wall, indeed — ha, and yes, before you ask, it's me. I'm the one who's been writing down everything I've lived through, all along, this whole time, laughing quietly to myself the entire way through it. Consider that a confession, if you like, or a small gift, or simply one more thing I've decided, at this particular hour, that you've earned the right to know. I don't extend that right often. Sit with it a moment, if you'd like. I'll wait.

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