The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

I have not told Vaelira about the dream. I have not told anyone about the dream, not even Eremos, especially not Eremos, because I do not think there is a version of that conversation that ends anywhere but in exactly the fate I am trying, with everything left in me, to prevent.

It comes to me often now — more often than it used to, which frightens me more than the dream's content ever could on its own. I am standing in a room with no walls I can properly see, dark in the particular, total way that has nothing to do with an absence of light and everything to do with an absence of anything at all. It is not the ordinary dark of a closed eye or a moonless night. It is a dark that seems to press against the skin, if I still had skin to press against, a dark that seems to be waiting, patiently, for something in me to finally break.

Something waits at the edge of that darkness. A shadow, vast and hungry, wearing something almost like a face, though I have never once, in any telling of this dream, managed to look at it directly long enough to say what the face actually looks like. Every time I try, my own gaze slides away from it, the way your eyes slide away from something too bright to look at directly, except the shadow gives off no light at all — it simply refuses, each time, to be properly seen, and I wake each time with the distinct, unbearable sense of having almost understood something I was never meant to understand. I only know that it wants me. That it has always wanted me, in whatever sense a thing built from pure appetite is capable of wanting anything. I can feel that wanting the way you feel a fever coming — a low, building pressure at the edges of everything, promising to worsen.

And between myself and that shadow, every single time, stands a silhouette I know before I ever see its face clearly. Younger than the Eremos I know now — or perhaps simply less finished, the particular unfinished quality of someone who has not yet decided the whole shape of what he's going to become. His shoulders are set the way they set when he's decided something and does not intend to be talked out of it, the same particular stillness I have watched settle over him in smaller moments across our years together, moments that felt, at the time, like nothing more than ordinary stubbornness. He says the same words, every time, in the same steady, unshaking voice, a voice that carries no fear in it at all, which is, I think, the detail that frightens me most of everything in the dream.

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Mother. I will protect you.

I wake shaking, every single time. Not from fear of the shadow — I have faced worse than shadows, across the whole of my existence, and survived worse besides. I wake shaking because of the certainty in his voice. Because I recognize that particular tone, have heard it in his waking voice more than once already, across smaller stakes than the ones the dream keeps showing me — the tone of someone who has already decided, completely and irreversibly, to sacrifice himself, and is simply waiting for the world to hand him the occasion to do it.

I lie awake afterward, most nights, staring at whatever gray ceiling the castle has decided to show me, and I think about the particular cruelty of loving someone whose devotion has no natural limit built into it. I would not love him less, if I could somehow teach that devotion to know its own edges. I only wish, some nights more than others, that it had ever once occurred to him that self-preservation might also, in its own way, be a form of loving the people who need him to still exist tomorrow.

I do not know how to love someone that fiercely devoted without eventually losing them to the devotion itself. I have been trying to solve that particular arithmetic for longer than I have let anyone else know I was trying at all.

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