The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

3.1 -- The Letter He Didn't Expect

He woke slowly, propped against the same low outcropping of pale stone that had risen briefly out of the ground during the fight and had since, along with the grass and the weight and the texture of everything, faded back into the Fair's ordinary weightless gray.

He was, as far as he could immediately tell, entirely unharmed -- no lingering ache, no bruise, nothing but the vague, disoriented sense of having been picked up, examined, and set back down by something considerably larger than himself.

Beside him sat a bear. Not his -- this one plush in a way the old machine's prize had never managed, dark fur soft and even, stitched by hands that had clearly never once run out of thread partway through an ear. A small silver bell hung from one paw. Beside the bear sat a small, neat stack of coins, far more than the toy could possibly have been worth, and beside the coins, folded once, sat a plain cream-colored letter with no name written on the outside of it at all.

He opened it with hands that were not, he noted with some private embarrassment, entirely steady.

He never told anyone, not even his sister, exactly what the letter said. What he would say, later, to the very few people who ever asked, was only that it made him go very still for a long moment, and that somewhere in reading it, the particular shape of the woman he'd fought resolved, all at once, into something else entirely -- not simply a stranger with an unusual gift, but someone whose name, once he understood it, explained everything about how thoroughly and how effortlessly she had ended their fight. He understood, reading it, that he had picked a quarrel with someone the wider Between would have called, in the plainest and least reverent terms available, a very large name indeed -- and that she had, for reasons he could not begin to guess at, decided not to hold that against him at all.

What troubled him more than any of it, in the end, was simpler. He looked at the beautiful, unbroken, perfectly stitched bear in front of him, and thought of the lopsided one still sitting, unclaimed, in its glass box across the Fair, and felt something close to grief.

She kept it, he thought. She took the one thing that actually mattered and left me something better in every way except the way that counted.

He gathered the coins, and the letter, and the new bear, and made his way, slowly, back toward the part of the Fair where he was supposed to meet his sister.

3.2 -- Little Bean

He found her exactly where he'd told her to wait, and what he found there stopped him dead in his tracks a good ten paces before he was close enough to be seen properly.

Nerissa -- small, dark-haired, sharp-featured in the particular way that made her look, always, like she was in the middle of noticing something everyone else had missed -- was leaning against Eremos's shoulder on a bench near the ring-toss stalls, one hand resting light against his arm, saying something that made him laugh, low and easy. As Kael watched, frozen, his little sister leaned in and pressed a quick, entirely unplanned kiss to Eremos's cheek, then went scarlet all the way to her ears the instant she'd done it, as though her own mouth had acted a full second ahead of her better judgment.

Eremos, for his part, looked genuinely startled -- pleasantly so, but startled -- and opened his mouth to say something.

"Anyway," Nerissa said, very fast, already standing, already halfway to fleeing the scene of her own crime, "I have to go. Kael's here. Bye."

"See you soon, Little Bean," Eremos called after her, amused, and she made a small strangled noise of protest at the nickname without breaking stride.

Kael opened his mouth.

His sister turned, mid-flight, and fixed him with a look of such total, unambiguous menace that every drop of blood in Kael's body -- a body that had, less than an hour ago, stood entirely unafraid in front of one of the strongest women in the Between -- went cold in an instant. If you say one single word, the look promised, with a clarity that needed no translation, I will end you, and I will have finished long before our older sister could possibly arrive to stop me.

Kael, who had just lost a fight to Vaelira with something close to dignity, closed his mouth immediately and without a trace of the pride that had gotten him into that fight in the first place.

His sister's shoulders dropped, all at once, into something smaller and more sheepish, and without another word she turned and started walking, and Kael -- still holding a stranger's bear, a stack of coins, and a letter he had no intention of discussing with anyone -- followed, and within a dozen steps the two of them had become nothing more than a pair of indistinguishable silhouettes threading their way out of the Fair's crowded heart.

He didn't say anything about it, the whole way home. He thought, though, more than once: she's been sneaking off to see him for months now. I always assumed it was mischief. I don't think it's only that anymore.

3.3 -- Faelia Strikes Again

Eremos had been waiting, with the specific patience he reserved for things he genuinely didn't mind waiting for, near the edge of the crystal castle's outer courtyard, when he noticed a small, familiar, entirely uninvited shape crouched behind one of the garden's low hedges.

"Little Bean," he said, not unkindly, and the shape froze, then slumped, then straightened with the particular resignation of someone who has just accepted that hiding was never actually going to work.

He had given her that nickname himself, months ago, the first time he'd caught her wandering the castle's outer halls with the wide-eyed, unhurried curiosity of someone who had clearly never been told she wasn't supposed to be there. He knew, in the specific and thorough way he knew every soul who had ever passed through his household, that she was not formally part of the harem -- none of the others knew this, as far as he could tell, and he'd never seen a compelling reason to correct the assumption, since she caused no trouble and seemed, in her own quiet way, happy to simply exist inside the edges of a family that had never quite noticed adopting her.

"I wasn't doing anything," she said, with the flat, unconvincing dignity of someone who was, in fact, doing something.

"You never are," Eremos agreed, settling onto the low garden wall beside her hedge with the air of a man who had nowhere urgent to be and every intention of getting to the bottom of this anyway. "How did you get in, this time? The wards around the outer gate have gotten considerably better since the last time you managed it."

She hesitated, weighing loyalty against the specific, undeniable fact that Eremos asking a direct question in that particular gentle tone had never once, in her experience, ended badly for the person answering it. "Faelia," she admitted finally.

Eremos closed his eyes and exhaled, slowly, through his nose, in the manner of a man revisiting a very old and very familiar frustration.

"Of course it was," he said.

"She said she wanted a companion," Little Bean offered, apparently deciding that if she was going to implicate her friend she might as well provide the full context. "Someone the same size as her. She said everyone in the harem is either too tall or too old-feeling and she wanted someone who'd actually understand what it's like being looked at like a child all the time even when you're not one."

"She's said that to me before," Eremos said, "roughly forty different times, about roughly forty different souls, none of whom she asked me first."

"Forty?"

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"I'm rounding generously." He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "There was a giantess, once. Faelia brought her home unannounced, informed the entire household that she was moving in, and when I asked why, she told me, and I remember this with what I can only describe as painful clarity, that she'd decided the household needed 'someone very large, to demonstrate, by comparison, how much better it is to be small.' The giantess stayed for two weeks. She kept braiding flowers into the top of the pantry doorframe because it was the only surface tall enough to interest her. Faelia cried for a full day when she finally left."

Little Bean, despite her best efforts to maintain the appropriate air of a girl in trouble, laughed -- a short, startled sound she clearly hadn't planned on making.

"So you're not mad," she said, testing the theory.

"I'm never mad at Faelia for this," Eremos said. "I'm occasionally mad at the universe for handing her that particular flavor of determination and no accompanying sense of asking permission first. You, on the other hand" -- he gave her a mild, sideways look -- "are welcome here. You've always been welcome here. I would simply prefer, in the future, that you use the front gate like anyone else, if only so the wards stop losing their minds every time you slip past them."

"Noted," she said, though from the particular gleam in her eye, Eremos privately doubted the note would hold for very long.

They sat together a while in comfortable, unhurried quiet, the kind that had become, over however long she'd been quietly haunting the edges of his household, entirely normal between them -- Eremos idly waiting for someone who had promised she'd be back soon, Little Bean idly waiting for absolutely nothing in particular, simply enjoying the sensation of being somewhere she had, technically, no right to be and no one seemed inclined to remove her from.

3.4 -- What Nerissa Actually Thought of Him

She hadn't meant to kiss him. That was the part she kept turning over, walking fast enough that Kael had to work to keep pace, face still burning.

She'd told herself, for months now -- since the very first time she'd slipped past the castle's wards on a dare from Faelia and Eremos had simply found her, unbothered, and started calling her Little Bean instead of throwing her out -- that her fascination with him was purely academic. He was, by any measure, ridiculous. He had an entire household of women who adored him, and he still somehow found time to sit on garden walls chatting with an uninvited girl who had no formal claim on him whatsoever. He was, she'd decided early on, clearly something of a womanizer, and she was clearly far too sensible to be one more name added to that list, and she'd found, over these last several months, an increasing number of small, private reasons to be annoyed with him: the nickname, which he refused to retire even after she'd asked twice; the easy, unhurried way he made every single person he spoke to feel like the only person in the room, which she'd told herself, repeatedly, was simply a practiced trick rather than anything sincere.

None of that had stopped her chest from doing something complicated every single time he said her name. None of it had stopped her, apparently, from kissing him on the cheek in broad daylight in front of her own brother, an act she had not planned, had not decided on, had simply done, the way you do a thing your body has already agreed to before your reasonable objections finish filing their paperwork.

It's just because he's charming, she told herself, for perhaps the fortieth time that hour. It doesn't mean anything.

She didn't believe herself even a little, and that, more than the kiss itself, was what actually frightened her.

3.5 -- The Rest of the Day, Where She Left Him

Vaelira, when she finally arrived to collect Eremos, spared exactly one raised eyebrow for the small dark-haired girl who'd fled past her minutes earlier before deciding, with the particular economy of someone who has long since stopped being surprised by anything Faelia's influence produces, not to ask.

"I need to borrow the rest of my day," she told him, pressing a light, unhurried kiss to his temple. "There's someone at the Fair I left mid-conversation, and I find I'd rather like to go finish it."

"Anyone interesting?" Eremos asked.

"Extremely," Vaelira said, already turning to go, already smiling the particular smile she wore only when something had genuinely surprised her, which happened, by her own private accounting, distressingly rarely these days. "I knocked him unconscious over a stuffed bear and left him a small fortune as an apology. I feel it would be rude not to see how he's taking it."

She found Kael, when she returned to the Fair some while later, exactly where she'd left the space around him -- the same weary, bewildered posture, sitting now with his sister beside him, the new bear balanced carefully on his knee like something he hadn't yet decided whether to be grateful for or resentful of.

"You came back," he said, when he noticed her approaching.

"I told you I would," Vaelira said, settling onto the bench beside him without waiting for an invitation. "I don't often bother finishing conversations I've already won. I find I want to finish this one anyway."

"I still wanted the other bear," he said finally, honest to the point of bluntness.

"I know," Vaelira said, and there was nothing unkind in it. "I'll tell you a secret, since you've earned one today the hard way. I wanted it for someone of my own, as it happens -- a girl I've only passed in a hallway once or twice, though something about her stuck with me regardless." Her gold-ringed eyes flicked, briefly, toward Nerissa's retreating shape, and something in her expression sharpened, delighted, as a small private piece clicked quietly into place that she decided, for now, not to say aloud. "I don't get curious like that often anymore. It's a rather nice feeling, when it shows up."

"So the fight was a test."

"The fight," Vaelira said, "was me being genuinely curious what would happen. Most people fold immediately when told no isn't an answer they have to accept. You didn't. That's rarer than you'd think."

3.6 -- Asking Strangers About a Name

It was some while later, after Vaelira had settled in beside them with the unhurried, proprietary comfort of someone who had decided, without asking, that this was where the rest of her afternoon belonged, that Nerissa finally spoke up, glancing toward the passing crowd with the particular restless energy of someone who had been patient for exactly as long as she intended to be.

"We should keep looking," she said, to her brother.

"Not tonight," Kael said, and there was a tiredness in it that had nothing to do with the fight.

"You said you'd help me look every time we came here."

"I did," he agreed. "And we will. Just -- not tonight."

She huffed, the particular put-upon sigh of a girl who had clearly had this exact conversation before, and rose anyway, wandering toward the nearest passing cluster of silhouettes.

"Excuse me," she said, to no one in particular and everyone at once. "Do you know a soul who -- " she hesitated, the way she always hesitated on this part. "Or -- are you her? Would you know if you were?"

The silhouettes drifted past without answering, the way silhouettes so often did, and Kael watched his sister's shoulders drop, just slightly, before she squared them again and turned to ask the same unanswered question of someone else entirely.

Vaelira, watching this small, quiet ritual play out at the edge of the Fair's noise and color, found that her curiosity, so recently satisfied by an afternoon spent losing on purpose to a stubborn man over a stuffed bear, had already found something new to fix itself on.

"Who," she asked Kael, "is your sister looking for?"

Kael watched Nerissa's small, determined shape move further into the crowd, still asking, still hoping, still not quite giving up, and did not answer right away.

"Our sister," he said finally. "The eldest of the three of us. She was already grown by the time either of us came along -- we barely remember her, if I'm honest, except that she loved us both fiercely enough to be worth remembering at all. She died protecting a daughter of her own, in the life before this one, or so the story always went in our family. We don't know if she made it here. We don't know if she's still whole, if she'd even want to be found after everything." He turned the new bear over once in his hands. "Nerissa's convinced we'll find her eventually. I try to believe that too, for her sake, even on the days it feels like looking for one grain of sand across every shore that's ever existed."

Vaelira went very quiet for a moment, turning something over behind her gold-ringed eyes that neither sibling could have guessed the shape of.

"Centuries, some searches take," she said finally, gently. "I know a woman who has been looking for her own daughter longer than either of you have existed, and she has never once let herself stop, no matter how many decades pass without a single answered question. She doesn't do it because she expects to find her soon. She does it because stopping would mean deciding the search was never worth continuing, and she's never once believed that."

"Do you think she'll find her?" Nerissa asked, having drifted back within earshot without either of them noticing.

"I don't know," Vaelira admitted. "I don't think that's really the question worth asking, though. I think the question is whether the search itself means something, regardless of how long it takes -- and I've watched that particular woman long enough to tell you, with total certainty, that it does. Whatever this world takes from people, it rarely manages to take that."

She said nothing further about who the woman was. It wasn't the moment for that thread to fully surface, and some things were better left to find their own way toward each other, in their own time.

[End of chapter.]

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!