The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

He was thirty-one winters old, give or take — his world did not keep careful calendars, only the rougher accounting of seasons turning — on the day everything changed, though he would not have called it that at the time, because at the time he had no words at all for what happened, only the plain and total fact of it happening to him. He remembers waking. That much survived clearly, in whatever fragments of memory the Between eventually allowed him to keep. He had been sleeping in a border-town's guest quarters, having beaten the region's reigning champion the evening before in a match that had left both men bloodied and one of them considerably more so, and he woke — not gradually, the way mornings ordinarily arrive, but all at once, eyes opening onto a light so vast and so total that for one disorienting instant it did not register as light at all, only as an absence of everything else. White, and then not white, some color his mind had no prior experience to file it under, filling every direction at once the way water fills a container it's been poured into, leaving no corner untouched. He does not remember what happened next. This is not a failure of memory in the ordinary sense — not the way a person forgets a dull afternoon, or loses the specific wording of a conversation years after having it. It is a genuine absence, a seam in the fabric of what he carries with him, the way a held breath simply stops being held without any memory of the exhale that released it. There was the light. And then there was, at some undefined distance afterward, a world that felt subtly, fundamentally different in ways he could never afterward articulate cleanly, though he tried, more than once, in the quiet hours between challengers, to put the difference into words. It was not that anything looked wrong, exactly. The border-town still stood, when his sight cleared enough to take it in — the same packed streets, the same fighting-rings he'd bloodied himself in the night before, the same wide gray sky he'd woken under every morning of his life. It was something underneath the looking. A texture the world had lost, or gained, he could never decide which word fit better. The sounds carried differently — not muffled, not sharpened, simply other, the way a familiar room sounds different when you've been told, correctly or not, that someone has died in it. He found, testing it in the days that followed, that hunger no longer gripped him quite the way it once had, that a wound closed faster than any wound had any right to close, that something in the specific, grinding fatigue that had accompanied every training session of his adult life had simply, quietly, stopped accumulating the way it used to. He told himself this was strength. He had trained his entire life for exactly this kind of transcendence, after all — the body finally outrunning its own limitations, becoming something closer to what a body was capable of becoming if you refused, thoroughly and completely, to accept its ordinary boundaries. He did not consider, because nothing in his experience had ever given him reason to consider it, that the difference he was feeling might have nothing to do with strength at all, and everything to do with the plain fact that he was no longer, in any sense his old world would have recognized, entirely alive. We, telling this, are not bound by his same ignorance, and it would be its own small dishonesty to let the reader wonder longer than he himself eventually stopped wondering. His world had ended in the plainest, least poetic way a world can end: a stone from beyond the sky, vast and indifferent and entirely without malice, had found the specific unlucky trajectory that intersected with the small blue-green world he called home, and had ended, in the space of a single blinding instant, everything that world had ever been or would ever become. There had been no war to blame, no god to curse, no enemy whose face could be hated for what happened. There had simply been a rock, falling, the way rocks fall everywhere in every direction of existence, and a world that happened to be standing where it landed. Torvin did not die screaming, the way so many others in his world did in that same terrible instant. He does not know why he was spared that particular ending, and this account is not presently prepared to explain the mechanism to him or to its reader — some doors are worth leaving closed a while longer, the way other tellings in this same account have already left other doors closed. What can be said, plainly, is only this: whatever the light was that blinded him that morning, it was not a light his old world had ever produced. And whatever came after it, walking through streets that still stood but no longer quite belonged to the world he remembered, was not, strictly speaking, still alive in the sense he had spent thirty-one winters being alive. He simply did not know this. He kept training. He kept fighting whoever crossed his path willing to test themselves against him. And somewhere in the specific, patient, uncomprehending way he kept doing both of those things, his entire world — border-towns, coastal fighting-rings, the packed red dirt of a training yard his father had once knelt in — quietly folded itself into something else entirely, something with a different purpose than the one it had always served.

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