The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

What she found, arriving, was not what she had spent so many careful, riddling months preparing herself to say.

There were other souls with him. They made no effort to hide it — nothing furtive in the scene at all, nothing that read, to anyone standing outside it, like betrayal in the ordinary sense of the word. But Vesper had never stood outside it before. She had only ever stood exactly where she was standing now, and from there, the sight of him easy and unhurried among women who were clearly not strangers to him landed like the floor giving way beneath a house she'd spent months quietly building.

Her whole understanding of things came apart in that one instant. Perhaps, she thought, there had never been any love from the foolish flower to begin with. Perhaps he didn't even know what the word meant himself, any more than she had, before she'd gone looking for an answer in a dozen other mouths. The words she had carried all this way caught somewhere in her chest and refused to move any further. She stood there long enough that one of the women noticed her — Vaelira, most likely, though this account cannot confirm it with any certainty, given how little of that particular afternoon survived in any form Vesper was ever willing to discuss afterward — and something in the woman's expression, some easy warmth entirely undisturbed by Vesper's presence, made the whole scene worse rather than better. This was not a house in crisis. This was simply, plainly, a life already full, one she had somehow convinced herself she was walking into empty-handed and unexpected.

It should be said, in fairness this account owes to the household even now, that the crystal castle and the meadow with its nameless tree had never once, in all their long years, been witness to real conflict among the women who called that place home. That much was true. But it was only partially true, the way most comfortable truths eventually turn out to be. They did not, underneath the ease, fully understand each other either — the years each of them had spent in the Between had taught every one of them, in her own private way, that they were all desperate souls, arrived from different griefs, carrying different hungers. Not every desperate soul answers the same ache the same way. That was the cruel reality underneath the warmth, the one truth this account's author had once hoped to keep quietly out of frame, and found, in the end, impossible to keep hidden entirely.

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This account will not walk you through exactly how the conflict unfolded. It doesn't need to — some scenes are more honestly served by their aftermath than by their play-by-play, and I think this is one of them. What matters is how it ended: with Vesper refusing, from that day forward, to look at Eremos's face again, carrying a hatred in her chest deep enough to reshape the whole of how she moved through the rest of her existence. She stopped asking riddles for a long while after that. It is, perhaps, the truest measure of how deeply the wound went — a soul who had built her entire identity around the act of asking simply stopped, for longer than this account can confidently place a number to, because every question she might have asked another soul suddenly felt like it was circling back, however indirectly, to the one question she could no longer bear to ask herself.

And yet — this, too, this account owes you plainly — those who still knew her well enough to see past the hatred she wore on the surface would tell you, if you asked them, that whatever love she'd carried toward him had never actually died. It had simply gone somewhere she refused to let anyone see again, folded away the same careful, guarded way she had once folded away her own honesty, back before a foolish plant had somehow, without meaning to, talked her into unfolding it.

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