The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Iris was thinking. It's worth saying plainly, before anything else, that she was not thinking with any regret attached to the thinking — I want that understood clearly, because it would be easy to mistake the particular stillness she wears sometimes for guilt, and it has never once, in all my years of watching her, actually been that. She had spent a stretch of time the universe itself has no proper unit for entirely alone, with no one anywhere close enough to witness the specific, difficult reality she carried — the plain, unglamorous fact of being the strongest thing that has ever existed, stronger than anyone else who has ever worn a shape in Something or Nothing or the gray patient distance folded between them. That had never, on its own, meant she stopped wanting affection. Perhaps, before she found the plant on the colorless hill, she hadn't wanted it in any way she'd have recognized by that name. But she knows the shape of the word now. She has known it for longer than she'll admit to anyone but herself, and she has changed her mind about wanting it entirely, the way an ocean changes its mind about a shoreline — slowly, and then, once it happens, completely.

I have wondered, more than once, what loneliness actually means for a being who cannot be lonely in the ordinary sense — who has never once, in the whole of her existence, lacked for company in the literal, physical accounting of the word, because company has simply never been a resource scarce enough to matter to something with her reach. She could summon anything. She could reshape the whole equilibrium of Something and Nothing simply by deciding to, and populate whatever remained of it with exactly the companionship she wanted, in whatever configuration pleased her most. She has never once done that. I think that restraint, more than any single fact about her power, is the truest measure of who she actually is underneath the myth the rest of this world has built around her name. She wanted something that could not be summoned. She wanted to be chosen, rather than manufactured — to be looked at by someone who had no idea what she was capable of, and to matter to that someone anyway, on the strength of nothing but the plain, unglorified fact of her company.

That is, I think, the entire shape of why Eremos matters to her the way he does, and why the lie she told him at their first meeting has never once felt, to her, like a burden worth setting down. He does not know what he holds still, simply by loving her the ordinary way. He thinks he loves a former flower, patient and gentle and glad of his company the way Flora is glad of it. He does not know he is, in the truest sense this account has ever managed to articulate, the only leash currently holding back the end of everything.

Here is where I think it's worth sitting a moment, before we go any further: time does not hold anything the same for very long. Not even Iris herself knows how much longer she'll be permitted to hold the particular ache she carries for affection now — an ache she still, on her better days, half-suspects she invented for herself, the way a very old thing sometimes invents small hungers simply to remind itself it's still capable of wanting anything at all. She has a girl now who calls her sister. She saw that girl's silhouette in the mirror while she was thinking all of this — Flora, reflected there, small and warm and entirely unguarded, the particular shape of someone who has never once needed to perform composure because composure has simply never been asked of her.

She has a girl who treats her as something close to a best friend, in her own particular, guarded fashion, if we're speaking of Vesper — a friendship built slowly, the way most things worth having are built slowly, out of two women who both understand, in their different ways, what it costs to let yourself be studied by someone else. Iris has never once asked Vesper what she is running from. Vesper has never once asked Iris what she's running toward. I think that mutual restraint, more than anything either of them has actually said to the other, is the entire foundation of whatever it is they have.

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And she has a family, if we're speaking of the rest of the castle's residents — the whole sprawling, teasing, found household that gathers at that long stone table and calls Ilyrisse "Mother" as a joke that has, over the centuries, quietly stopped being entirely a joke. She thinks of them, sometimes, in the particular quiet hours no one else is awake to witness, and marvels — actually marvels, in whatever way a being who has already seen everything is still capable of marveling at something — that a household this ordinary, this domestic, this full of borrowed teacups and half-finished arguments about whose turn it is to cook, exists at all inside a world she could unmake with a single unkind thought.

I want to tell you a little about how she actually lives inside that household, day to day, because I think the plainness of it matters, set against everything else this account is asking you to understand about the size of what she carries. She likes to walk. Not travel, in the sense the rest of the household means it, folding distance the way a domain folds distance when it's needed — simply walk, on her own two borrowed feet, the ordinary, unhurried way, because it is, she has told Flora more than once, one of the few genuinely free things left in an existence that has never once had to pay for anything else it wanted. She has been seen sleeping directly on the bare earth of Ilyrisse's conservatory more than once, curled small in the dirt among the one living, growing thing in the whole castle, in a stillness so total it unsettles anyone who stumbles across it without warning — the particular quiet of something old enough that ordinary rest has stopped meaning what it means to the rest of them, replaced by something closer to memory on a scale none of them could properly follow even if she tried to explain it.

She does not eat the way the rest of the household eats, not out of any necessity, but because she likes the ritual of it — the shared table, the passed dishes, the particular comfort of being handed something by someone who loves her rather than simply conjuring it for herself. She teases Flora mercilessly and means every bit of the affection underneath it. She redirects the household's teasing away from Ilyrisse whenever it edges too close to the older woman's still-tender unfamiliarity with being loved so casually, so constantly, by so many people at once. She is, in nearly every visible way, simply one more woman in a large, warm, occasionally chaotic family. That ordinariness is not an accident. I think it is the most carefully constructed thing about her — more carefully built, in its own way, than any Fragment any of the others have ever earned.

And there is a man, too, though she still doubts, some nights, more than she'd ever say out loud, whether he treats her with anything like the affection she actually aches for. Everything, on the surface of it, is perfect. And yet there is something in her chest that hurts. It sounds almost like a joke, put that way — the emptiness, the void itself, the strongest woman the universe has ever known, carrying pain. And it is not a small, momentary thing, the kind that passes with an evening's distraction. It is constant. It has been constant for longer than she has let anyone, even Flora, fully understand.

She stood at that mirror a long while before Flora ever spoke, tracing, without quite meaning to, the particular line of her own reflected jaw, the same severe, composed features she wears for the rest of the household, wondering, not for the first time, whether the face she'd built for herself across all these centuries was actually hers, or simply the shape she'd decided, long ago, would be easiest for a fragile world to look at without breaking.

Iris looked at Flora, and said she wanted to tell her a story — to see it from the perspective of her little sister, she said, though she didn't say, not yet, that she wasn't entirely certain whether the story required her to kill someone by the end of it. She did not mean Flora. I want that understood immediately, before your mind runs anywhere unkind with it. She meant someone else. Or something else. Something we will, I suspect, come to understand better by the end of this account, or perhaps in another one still to come.

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