The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Once, Iris said, there was evil.

She did not say it as though she were exempting herself from the word. I want you to understand that clearly, because I think it matters more here than almost anywhere else in this account: Iris has never once, in all the time I've known her, imagined herself as simply good. The universes she has unmade across the whole of her existence are not few. The innocents folded into that unmaking are not few either. She does not flinch from that reckoning the way a smaller being might, softening the truth of itself to make the telling easier. She simply carries it, the way she carries everything, at a scale none of the rest of us are built to fully imagine.

This evil, she told Flora, was a being of total and absolute power — capable of standing in the past, the present, and the future, all at once, with no contradiction, no strain, no sense that any one of the three crowded out the others.

I want to try to give you some shape for it, even though Iris herself never gave Flora more than the barest outline to work with — some concession, I think, to how much a mind like Flora's can actually hold of something this abstract before the shape of it simply slides away unrecognized. Picture, if you can, something that does not properly have edges — not because it lacks a body, the way a silhouette lacks a body before it learns to build one, but because whatever body it does have never finishes existing at any single point long enough for an edge to be meaningful. You could not point to where it began and where it ended, because beginning and ending are ideas that only make sense to things confined to one direction of time at all. This evil was not confined. It simply was, everywhere it had ever been and would ever be, all at the same moment, folded together into something no ordinary consciousness could look at directly without losing its own sense of where it stood.

Flora looked at her doubtfully, the particular open, honest confusion she brings to anything abstract enough to slip past her grasp on the first pass. Iris corrected herself, reaching for a simile instead, the way she so often does when the shape of a thing refuses to land in plain words alone.

Imagine, she said, that you could exist while eating your breakfast, your lunch, and your dinner, all in the same instant — morning, midday, and evening happening to you at once, none of them waiting politely for the others to finish first.

Flora looked at her, incredulous, entirely unconvinced this was even possible, and wondered, not for the first time, whether Iris was playing another one of her jokes on her. It would not have been the first. There was, after all, the time Iris had told her, with a perfectly straight face, that the stars were food — a delicacy, she'd said, that only souls who had never once been a plant were permitted to reach and eat.

I want to tell you that story properly, rather than simply mentioning it in passing, because I think it says something true about both of them that the rest of this account would be poorer for skipping. It happened on an ordinary evening, the two of them lying together in the grass of the shared meadow, looking up at whatever the Between offers in place of a proper night sky — scattered points of pale light, motionless, silent, closer to memory than to astronomy. Flora had asked, the way she asks most questions, without any particular expectation of a serious answer, what the stars actually were. And Iris, delighted by the particular shape of the opening, had told her, in the same warm, unhurried voice she uses for every other true thing she says, that they were food. That they tasted, she'd claimed, like the very last bite of something wonderful, the bite you always wish you'd eaten more slowly. That only souls who had never once been rooted in soil themselves were permitted to eat them, some old, arbitrary rule of the Between's own making, because a soul who remembered being a plant would recognize the stars as kin rather than as sustenance, and the recognition alone would sour the taste beyond eating.

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Flora had gone entirely still at that, staring up at the sky with new and total wonder, and had asked, in the smallest voice, whether that meant she could never taste one. Iris, already fighting not to laugh, had confirmed it solemnly, and Flora — trusting, quick, and entirely without guile — had bolted up from the grass that very same moment and gone racing off toward the castle to find Vaelira, breathless, certain that if anyone could bend an old unfair rule on her behalf, it would be her. She'd found Vaelira half-asleep against a pillar in the western hall and asked, with total sincerity, whether Vaelira might please fetch her a star to eat, since they looked so beautiful hanging up there that surely, she reasoned, they had to taste wonderful too.

As all of you already know, given how Vaelira is, she did not stop laughing about it for a full month, and made absolutely certain that everyone in the household heard the story at least once, usually twice, occasionally with embellishments Flora herself had never actually said — an entire elaborate account, by the third or fourth retelling, of Flora attempting to climb the castle's own tallest tower with a basket, fully intending to harvest the sky herself if no one else would help her reach it. Flora, for her part, took the teasing with the same unbothered good humor she takes most things, though she did, for a good while afterward, eye Iris with the particular narrow suspicion of someone who has learned, the hard way, that not every gentle voice can be trusted with every honest question.

So Iris tried a different simile, this one considerably cruder, the particular flavor of humor she reserves for moments when she wants to watch Flora's whole face go pink at once. Imagine, she said, that you could spend the whole of a single night having as much of whatever you liked with Eremos as you wanted, without ever once growing tired, without ever once needing to rest from whatever you'd already had that morning, in the present, and in whatever was still to come later that same evening — all three, happening together, none of them using up the others.

Flora went red at that, the particular deep, unhidden blush she has never once learned to hide the way the older women in the household have learned to hide theirs, and said, quickly, that she understood now. No one — least of all this account — is fully certain whether she said that out of genuine understanding, or out of the particular flustered embarrassment that makes a person claim understanding simply to end a conversation before it can go any further. I suspect we'll never fully know, and I don't think either of us is much worse off for it.

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