The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

I looked at my own body, because it seemed, under the circumstances, like the most reasonable place to begin.

It was kneeling. That was the first fact, and I want to be honest that it took me a moment longer than it should have to properly register it as a fact about me, rather than simply a fact about the world in general — the particular disorientation of waking into a body that has already made decisions on your behalf, has already folded itself into a posture you didn't choose and wouldn't, given the option, have chosen for yourself. My knees were pressed into ground that gave no softness back, and my wrists were bound behind me in a way that pulled unevenly at my shoulders, chains, cold enough that I could feel their exact shape through whatever thin remaining warmth my skin still had to offer them.

I want to pause here and tell you something, because I think it matters, and because I don't think I'll have many better places to say it. I felt things I had never felt before. Not new versions of old feelings — genuinely, structurally new, the way a color might feel new to someone who has spent an age of the universe seeing only gray. I felt pain in my body, a specific, located, insistent thing that had nothing to do with grief and nothing to do with longing and nothing to do with any of the other larger, older aches I'd already spent centuries learning the shape of. This was smaller than those. Smaller, and somehow, in its smallness, far more immediate. And I felt fear.

I want to say that plainly, without dressing it up in anything, because I think there's something almost comic about it, even now, even having lived through what came after: a plant, afraid. A thing that spent an age of the universe rooted and voiceless and untouched by anything sharper than weather, discovering, on its knees, on ground that wasn't its own, in a body it wasn't certain belonged to it, that fear was a texture available to it after all. I hadn't known. I want you to understand that I genuinely hadn't known, the way you don't know a room has a second door until the day you finally need one and go looking.

I looked around, as much as looking around was available to me from a kneeling position with my head still swimming from whatever had brought me here. I won't pretend the place was beautiful, because it wasn't, and I don't think dressing it up in kinder language would serve either of us well tonight. There were heads. There were bodies. Human, all of it, arranged across ground that had clearly hosted this particular arrangement more than once before, the way a place learns, over enough repetition, to simply expect a certain kind of use. There were men standing among it all with swords, dressed in armor that had seen more practical use than ceremony, the specific plain, functional roughness of clothing meant for work rather than display.

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I looked at my own body properly, then, for the first time since waking — bare above the hips, the way the others near me were bare, and marked in ways I didn't have language ready for yet. Lines that looked, even to eyes still fogged with whatever had carried me here, like the memory of a whip laid down more than once across the same stretch of skin. Bruises, old and new both, layered across each other the way bruises do on a body that has stopped being given time to properly heal between one hurt and the next. I moved my arm, just slightly, testing the chain's small allowance, and felt something sharp answer the movement — not the older ache, the deeper one that had nothing to do with a body at all, but something plainer, something located precisely where the movement had asked something of a wound that wasn't ready to be asked anything. I suppose that is what pain is. I'm still not entirely certain. I distrust my own credentials as a witness to it, given how recently I'd apparently acquired the capacity to be one at all.

I want to tell you something else, too, because I think it belongs here, even though it embarrasses me slightly, even now, to admit it. I did not know, at first, whether the body kneeling on that ground was truly my own. I don't mean that in the ordinary sense, the sense a mortal soul might mean it, waking disoriented from some fever and needing a moment to remember whose hands these are at the ends of whose arms. I mean it more strangely than that. I have worn this human shape for a comparatively short span of my long existence, learned it the way you might learn a language spoken in a country you've only recently arrived in — well enough to be understood, not yet well enough to stop occasionally translating everything internally first. And waking into a body that ached in ways I had never asked it to ache, marked in ways I had never asked it to be marked, I found myself genuinely uncertain, for longer than I'd like to admit, whether this was the same shape I'd left the meadow wearing, or whether whatever had carried me here had simply poured me into something else entirely and left me to discover the difference on my own.

I decided, eventually, that it didn't matter. A plant does not spend long deciding whether the soil beneath it is truly its own soil, in the sense of ownership a person might mean by the word. It simply notices that it has roots in it now, and proceeds from there. So I let the question go, the way I've learned to let a great many questions go over the centuries, and turned my attention instead to whatever else the body was still willing to tell me.

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