The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

He returned to the room with the portrait sooner than he'd meant to, the strange indignity of the fly still sitting oddly in his chest, and found himself, not for the first time, turning the whole business of waiting over from a different angle than usual — not the fractured ending this time, not the abyss he still had no name for, but the beginning. The first vision. The one that had started all of this, long before any of the later ones had learned to change on him.

It had come to him whole, the way his oldest and clearest visions always came — not a story unfolding scene by scene, but a single, total certainty settling into him all at once, the way a fact settles into a person who has simply always known it and is only now getting around to noticing. He had seen Ilyrisse before he had ever set eyes on her, exactly as he'd told no one but this empty room more times than he could count. He had seen the shape of a life beside her, whole years of it, textures and mornings and the specific unhurried comfort of two people who had stopped needing to perform anything for each other a very long time ago.

He had seen, too — bleeding in at the edges of that same vision, sideways and half-formed the way lesser certainties always arrived alongside the central one — a moment that had not, at the time, meant anything to him at all. A stretch of gray, featureless distance. A vast, formless pressure bearing down from every direction at once, patient and hungry in the specific way only something without appetite in the ordinary sense could be hungry. And between that pressure and the woman he had already, in his own private accounting, decided was his — a back.

He had not seen a face. His visions rarely bothered with faces; whatever gift showed him favorable paths and hidden treasure had never much cared for the specific architecture of a person's features, only for the shape of what they meant to whoever was asking. He had seen a back, broad and unmoving, planted between Ilyrisse and whatever vast dark thing was reaching for her, and he had felt, in the single unbroken instant the vision allowed him to feel anything at all, an absolute and total certainty that whoever that back belonged to would not move. Not for anything. Not even for the thing pressing toward it with all the patient hunger of something that had never once, in the whole of its existence, failed to eventually take what it wanted.

He had not known, then, whose back it was. He had assumed, in the easy and unexamined way a man assumes things about a future he already believes belongs to him, that it must be his own — some later, stronger version of himself, standing exactly where a man in his position ought to stand, between the woman he loved and whatever the world sent to threaten her.

It took him a very long time, and a great many quieter, more careful returns to that same fractured edge of the vision, to understand that the back was not his.

He recognized it, in the end, not by any feature of the shape itself — it never resolved into anything more specific than shoulders and stillness, no matter how many times he made himself look — but by the particular quality of what stood behind that stillness. A kind of patience he had never once, in his own long life, managed to cultivate in himself. A willingness to simply hold, without straining, without the visible effort of a man forcing himself to be brave, the way a tree holds a hillside not through any decision made in a single dramatic moment but through the accumulated, unglamorous fact of having grown there, slowly, for longer than anyone thought to measure.

He never learned a name for it from the vision itself; his gift had never once, in his entire life, bothered with the specific architecture of a person's features or a person's name, only with the shape of what they meant to whoever was asking. What he had, instead, was the plain, unglamorous arithmetic of a man who had spent decades in this same room piecing together scraps: a Dominion that had not existed before, ruled by a woman he still loved and a partner she had chosen who was spoken of only ever by the same handful of epithets — plant-souled, a searcher, patient past anything reasonable. He set that unnamed partner beside the unnamed back in his vision and found, turning both over slowly in the quiet of this room, that neither one left any room for a third possibility. They were the same fact, wearing two different silences.

He said the name aloud once, that evening, for the first time in longer than he could remember letting himself say it at all — not because saying it now cost him nothing, but because he had finally grown tired of the specific exhaustion of avoiding a single word. It cost him exactly as much as he'd always suspected it would.

Eremos.

It was Eremos who stood between Ilyrisse and whatever waited at the far edge of that fractured future. It was Eremos who would not move.

He remembered, with a clarity that still cost him something even now, the exact night he had decided what to do with that recognition — a decision made not in this room, not in front of this portrait, but alone, in a different stretch of Something entirely, in the hours immediately after the vision finally resolved into a shape he could no longer pretend not to understand. He had a future in front of him, whole and certain, showing him a life beside a woman who was, in every fragment his gift had ever offered him, exactly matched to what he was. And standing at the very edge of that same future, guarding the door he would have had to walk through to reach it, was a man who was never going to step aside.

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He could have fought for it. He understood, even then, that his own strength — vast, borrowed, bent around by both worlds without argument — might well have been enough to win that particular contest, had he chosen to make it a contest at all. He had turned that possibility over for a long time, in the solitary hours before he finally decided anything, and had arrived, in the end, at a conclusion that had nothing to do with fear of losing.

There had been one night, in particular, that he still returned to more often than the others — a night he had come as close as he ever came to walking toward that vision anyway, door and guard and consequence be damned. He had stood at the edge of a stretch of Something he no longer bothered to name, turning the shape of Eremos's back over in his mind, testing his own resolve the way he tested everything, patiently, methodically, looking for the crack that would let him justify what some smaller, hungrier part of him wanted regardless of what the rest of him had already decided. He had told himself, that night, that a man willing to die in front of a door was not necessarily a man who deserved to keep it closed forever — that guarding something out of love did not automatically outrank wanting it just as fiercely from the other side.

He had taken three full steps in that vision's direction before he stopped himself, and the thing that stopped him was not conscience, exactly, and was not fear either. It was a single, unbidden image that arrived alongside the vision the way lesser certainties always arrived at its edges: Ilyrisse's face, turned toward that unmoving back with an expression his gift had never shown him from any closer than this, an expression that held nothing in it resembling doubt, or waiting, or the specific hunger of a woman who had not yet found what she was looking for. It held only the plain, settled fact of someone who had already arrived exactly where she meant to be.

He had not been able to make himself want to be the reason that expression changed. He turned around that night, and did not test his resolve against the vision again in quite the same way afterward.

He simply could not make himself want a door that someone else was willing to die in front of rather than open for him.

It was around then — in the same stretch of solitary years, before the decision had fully hardened into something he no longer questioned — that he remembered a question someone else had asked, once, long before any of this, in a life he barely let himself think about anymore. He had known her only briefly, in Something, in the specific and narrow window before either of them had understood what they were about to become. A woman clever in a way few people bothered to be, unafraid of him in a way fewer still managed, indigo hair and a laugh that arrived rarely and meant more for the rarity. She had asked him, once, half in earnest and half testing the ground the way she tested everything, whether he ever worried that the life he was building — the collecting, the guarding, the quiet, patient hoarding of everything worth having — was the same thing as building a life at all, or whether it was simply the shape loneliness takes when it's dressed up carefully enough to look like ambition.

He did not remember what he'd told her. He remembered, more clearly than he liked to admit, that she had stopped asking him things not long after, and that he had told himself, at the time, this was simply the natural cooling of something that had never been more than convenience to begin with.

He understood now, turning the memory over beside the vision of the back that would not move, that she had likely seen some fragment of the same future he had — felt some early, unnamed edge of the same fractured certainty, long before either of them had words for what it meant. He did not know, and would not learn for some time yet, that she too had chosen not to follow the path her own gift or her own instinct had shown her. He only knew, sitting with both memories side by side in the quiet of this room, that the two of them — himself and a woman whose name he still could not quite bring himself to think without an old, worn-smooth ache attached to it — had arrived, independently, at the same silent conclusion, without ever once comparing notes.

Neither of them had wanted to walk toward a door someone else would have had to be moved aside to open.

He believed, without needing anyone to confirm it for him, that this had been the right choice. Not the easiest one — nothing about standing in this room for as long as he had stood in it suggested ease — but the right one, out of however many thousand other paths his own gift could theoretically have laid out for him instead. It was, he thought, a kind of silent truth two people could share without ever once needing to say it aloud to each other: that some doors are worth leaving closed, once you understand who is standing on the other side of them, unwilling to move.

He had not moved either, in the end. He had simply stopped walking toward the vision at all, and started, instead, waiting — for the fractured half of that same future to resolve into something he could finally act on, for the shape of the abyss to reveal enough of itself that he could walk toward the people he loved without walking directly into whatever had apparently, in some version of what was coming, already killed them once.

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