The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

6.1 — Every Woman, Fully

"This one is, I think, the gentlest of everything I carry," Eremos said, "and also, in its own quiet way, the one that frightens me most, because of what it implies about the rest of me."

"You already know, all of you, that once I love someone, I do not stop. That much has been true of me since the very beginning, since long before I understood any of this mechanism existed at all — it is simply how the permanence of my feelings has always worked, love included. What I want to explain now is what happens on the rare occasions that love, for all of you together, rises past even that already-permanent baseline, into something too large for the ordinary version of me to hold while still functioning as a single, undivided person able to attend to any one of you specifically."

"There have been evenings," he said, "usually after some occasion large enough to gather most of the household together at once — a celebration, an anniversary of some kind, an ordinary evening that simply happened to hold enough warmth in it all at once — where something in me stops being able to hold the love for each of you as separate, individually directed things, and instead becomes something closer to a single, undivided devotion aimed at the whole of you simultaneously. In that state, I do not favor. I do not choose. I am not capable, in that state, of loving one of you more or less than any other in a given moment, because the version of me holding it has stopped being able to perceive you as separate people to divide attention between at all — only as facets of a single, whole, beloved thing."

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"We named him the Constant," Ilyrisse said, her voice soft, "because that was the truest word any of us could find for it. He does not choose favorites, in that state, because he has become, however briefly, incapable of choosing at all. He simply loves, entirely and without division, everyone present."

6.2 — What He Carries

"In power," Eremos said, "the Constant is not, in the ordinary sense, a fighter's state at all. What he amplifies is protection — an instinct, heightened past anything the rest of me can manage, to shield everyone he perceives as part of that undivided devotion. I have felt him rise, once or twice, in genuine danger, and what he offers, in those moments, is not destruction aimed outward but a kind of total, unbreakable defense aimed at holding every person he loves safe, simultaneously, without any of the calculation the rest of me would ordinarily need to apply to protecting so many people at once."

"He is the only one of them I have never regretted," he added, quietly. "The only one I have never once wished I could simply stop carrying."

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