The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

I also carry hatred, for a man. What kind of man he actually is, I do not wish to think about tonight, and I will not write his name in full either — Caedmon, though even setting the letters down this once makes something in my chest go tight and cold in a way I resent more than I can properly express. I intend to write the rest of what I feel toward him without ever finishing the thought, because some hatreds, I have found, keep more of their power when they are left half-spoken, even here, even in a book no one else will ever read.

I knew him once, or knew of him, in a life so distant from this one that I sometimes wonder whether it belonged to me at all, or to some earlier woman wearing my face who simply handed her memories down to me the way a mother hands down an old ring. He was a visionary, in his own right — gifted, or cursed, with the particular sight that lets a soul glimpse favorable paths through whatever tangled future waits ahead of it. I remember, faintly, the particular quality of his attention, back when attention from a man like that still felt like something worth having rather than something to be wary of. He had a way of looking at a person as though he were already reading the whole of their unwritten future off the surface of their face, and I confess, in whatever life it was that we shared, I once found that quality flattering rather than unsettling. I do not find it flattering any longer.

I am told, though I have never confirmed it myself and do not intend to seek the confirmation out, that he kept — keeps still, perhaps, wherever he currently wanders — an unfinished portrait. Myself among its subjects. Vaelira too. A gallery of women he once loved, or believed he loved, or simply could not bring himself to finish painting because finishing it would have meant admitting, at last, that none of us were ever going to sit for him again. I have never seen the portrait. I do not wish to. There is something in the very idea of it — my own face, half-finished, hanging in some hidden room, waiting on a completion that will never come — that unsettles me more than almost anything else this entry has asked me to write down tonight.

His visions once showed him something gentler than what he eventually saw. A warm reunion, he believed — myself and the others, found again in the Between, welcoming him the way you welcome someone whose absence has genuinely been missed. I try to imagine, some nights, what that reunion might have looked like, in whatever unlived thread it was meant to happen in. I do not think I would have welcomed him as warmly as his own vision once promised him I would. But I did not get the chance to prove that suspicion true or false, because I do not know when the vision began to crack. I do not know what he saw, exactly, once the cracking started, only that it stopped being warmth and became, instead, an abyss. A silence too total to survive walking toward. A certainty, settled into him the way certainty settles into a man who has spent his whole existence trusting his own sight above every other instinct he owns, that if he ever tried to find us, the finding would kill him.

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I understand now, writing this, what stood between his vision and the reunion he once believed was waiting for him. It was Eremos. Not the Eremos I know now, gentle and patient and endlessly, exhaustingly kind to every stray, wounded soul that crosses his path. Some other Eremos — a shape my own visions have already shown me more times than I can count without my hand beginning to shake around the pen. A back, wide and immovable, planted between myself and whatever dark, hungry thing waits at the edge of that future, refusing to yield so much as a single handspan of ground. Caedmon is said to have seen that shape too, in his own visions, from his own angle, and to have understood, watching my face turn toward that unmovable back with an expression he could only describe as belonging entirely to someone who had already arrived exactly where she meant to be — that I was already his. Already claimed, in whatever sense a soul this old and this tired can still be claimed by anyone. Not lost to circumstance. Chosen, deliberately, over and over, by a version of Eremos too devoted to know how to stop choosing me even at the cost of everything else he might have been.

Caedmon stopped walking toward his own vision after that, I am told. I do not know whether to call that mercy or cowardice on his part. I find, writing this now, that I do not particularly care which word fits him better. I only know that some part of me, small and ungenerous and entirely unbecoming of an empress, is glad he stopped. Glad, and ashamed of the gladness, in more or less equal measure. I do not know where he is now, or what he does with his remaining days, tending whatever hidden room still holds our unfinished faces. I find I do not wish to know that either. Some doors, even for me, are better left unopened.

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