The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

5.1 -- What the Between Remembers Too

I lay awake a long while that night, once things had properly quieted, turning the whole day over in my mind the way you do when something's happened that you don't quite have the shape of yet.

I'd always understood -- the way everyone eventually understands it, once they've been here long enough -- that Missions pull from what we were. From Something. From the lives we lived before we ever woke up as silhouettes on gray stone: burgers conjured for people who were never mages, wands conjured for people who were, whole meals and objects and small material comforts, all of it shaped by memory, the specific architecture of a life already lived and finished before this one ever began.

What I hadn't understood, not really, not until I sat with that little fruit in my hand and thought honestly about where its shape had come from, was that the pull doesn't stop there. It isn't only Something feeding these rewards. It's here too. It's now. Whatever I felt that night with Eremos -- the wanting, the need to feel like enough standing next to women who'd had centuries longer than me to learn how to be loved -- that wasn't a memory pulled up out of some life I lived and lost. That was something I made, here, inside the gray stone world I'm currently living in, and the world had apparently decided it was real enough, weighty enough, to shape a reward around.

I thought, too, about the wolves, and the garden, and the particular fear I'd never once had the chance to feel back when I was still rootbound on that hill. I wondered whether that counted the same way -- whether some future Mission, mine or someone else's, might someday pull from the exact shape of what I felt kneeling in that thin gray soil with six sets of hungry eyes fixed on me, and turn it into something else entirely, an object or a gift or a small strange ability nobody could have predicted from the outside. I don't know. I think I like not knowing. I think some things are better left as questions you get to keep turning over for a long time instead of answers you finish with all at once.

I don't think that's a small thing, once you sit with it properly. I think it means this place isn't simply a waiting room running old rules on new arrivals, the way I used to picture it without ever quite saying so to myself -- some quiet afterthought tacked onto the end of a life that already happened, going through motions that don't really count for anything new. I think it means the Between is still alive, in whatever sense a place like this can be alive. Still capable of taking what we feel right now, tonight, in this exact gray unfinished moment, and turning it into something real. Something with weight. Something that can, apparently, cause an entire crystal castle full of women to lose several hours to an overwhelming and highly specific appetite, but also -- and I think this is the part that actually matters -- something that means nothing any of us feels here is wasted. Even the messy feelings. Even the ones we're embarrassed by afterward. This world is still listening.

I don't know what to do with that, exactly, except to lie here and let it settle, the way you let any big true thing settle before you try to build something out of it.

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5.2 -- Falling Asleep in the Dirt

I found Iris later that night, out past the last of the crystal halls, in the small patch of open garden Ilyrisse keeps at the edge of her Fragment -- real soil, real growing things, the one part of the whole vast castle that isn't crystal at all. It's a small space, tucked almost apologetically between two towering walls of glass, as though even a woman as composed as Ilyrisse needed one corner of her world that hadn't been polished into something perfect. I've always liked it more than the grand halls, if I'm honest. It smells like something growing, which none of the rest of the castle ever quite manages no matter how beautiful it gets.

Iris was lying flat on her back directly on the earth, not on any of the soft furnishings scattered everywhere else in easy reach, just stretched out on the bare ground the way she does sometimes, for reasons she's never explained to me and I've never quite worked up the nerve to ask about properly. Her hair had come loose and lay fanned out around her head, dark against the pale soil, and one hand rested open and empty on her stomach, rising and falling slowly with her breathing.

She looked, lying there under whatever passes for stars in a Fragment that doesn't have any, like she was remembering something. I couldn't have told you what. There's a stillness that comes over her sometimes, rare, and gone again almost as soon as you notice it, like a held breath let out somewhere just past where you can hear it.

"Long day," she said, without opening her eyes, when I sat down near her in the grass.

"You could say that."

"I heard about the fruit." A small, unhurried smile. "You've had quite an effect on the household."

"I didn't mean to."

"I know you didn't. That's rather the whole point of you, isn't it." She said it kindly, the way she says almost everything to me, and reached over without looking to pat the ground beside her, an invitation I took without needing to be asked twice.

I lay down next to her in the dirt, tired in the good, worn-out way that comes after a day too full to properly catch up with until you finally stop moving, and looked up at the same nothing she was looking at. I didn't ask what she was thinking about. I had the strange, small feeling I sometimes get around Iris -- that whatever it was, it belonged to a version of her far older and far larger than the easy, teasing, older-sister shape she wears around me every day, and that asking would only make both of us aware of a distance I'd rather not think about too hard.

So I didn't ask. I just lay there beside her, in the actual dirt, under a sky that wasn't really a sky, thinking about wolves and fruit and a whole household laughing itself breathless over something I hadn't meant to start, and felt, in spite of everything, or maybe because of all of it together, entirely and simply happy.

I fell asleep like that. In the garden. Next to her. I don't remember deciding to. I just remember being tired, and warm, and glad, in the specific uncomplicated way I don't think I ever once managed on my hill, waiting all those centuries for a sun that never got close enough to touch.

It got close enough eventually. That's the whole of it, I think, if I had to put the day into one sentence before I let myself finally stop thinking and just sleep.

It got close enough eventually.

[End of chapter 9.]

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