The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

4.1 -- Homecoming with a Basket

The world folded again, the way it always does, and I was back outside the crystal halls with my arms full -- the traded fruit and grain from that morning, plus the little handful of heart-shaped fruits tucked carefully into the fold of my dress, still faintly warm the way anything freshly conjured tends to be. I remember feeling, walking back in through those enormous glass doors, exactly the kind of tired-happy that comes after a day that went sideways and then came right again anyway. I wanted to tell everyone about the wolves. I wanted, even more, to show off the strange new fruit, the way you want to show off anything you made yourself for the first time, regardless of whether it turns out to be useful or just pretty.

I found the shared meal already gathering near the center hearth -- a good two dozen women or more, passing around whatever the day's cooking had produced, laughing at something someone had said before I even got close enough to hear the joke. It was, I remember thinking, a wider gathering than usual -- a few faces I only half-recognized had drifted in with the regulars, the way new arrivals sometimes do when word gets around that Ilyrisse's halls are the warmest place to spend an idle evening. I set down the traded grain and fruit with the others contributing their own morning's gathering, and then, a little shy, a little proud, I held out one of the heart-shaped fruits on my open palm.

"Look what my Mission gave me," I said, probably grinning like an idiot, because I definitely was.

Someone took it before I'd even finished the sentence. I don't remember who -- there were simply too many hands reaching by then, curious the way anyone is curious about something small and pretty and new. I remember it being passed hand to hand, admired, someone commenting on how pretty it was, someone else laughing that of course my reward would come out looking like that, of course it would, and within a few minutes half a dozen of them had tried a bite, and I felt, for one entire, uncomplicated moment, simply happy that something I'd made had been so well received.

I did not think, even once, to ask myself what it might actually do.

4.2 -- Something in the Air

I noticed the shift before I understood it, which I think is exactly the order these things are supposed to go, looking back. A laugh that lingered a half-beat too long. A hand resting on someone's arm that stayed there a little longer than the conversation strictly required. Someone across the hearth who had been quietly reading only minutes before now very much not reading, her book closed in her lap, her attention gone somewhere else entirely, somewhere that made her cheeks go pink in a way that had nothing to do with the fire.

It wasn't just one or two of them, either, once I actually started paying attention. There was a tall woman I didn't recognize, dark-haired and sharp-featured, dressed like she'd stepped straight out of some old formal portrait, who had gone very quiet and very still in a way that seemed entirely at odds with the composed severity of her clothing, watching the fire with an intensity that had nothing to do with the flames. Nearby, someone smaller, younger-looking in the face though I knew that meant nothing here, had gone bright red all the way to her ears and kept fanning herself with one hand as though the room had gotten warmer in the last few minutes, which -- I would come to understand very shortly -- it more or less had. A soul with pale, near-silver hair and an air of ancient, unbothered dignity, who I'd have sworn ten minutes earlier looked entirely too proud to blush at anything, was blushing furiously and pretending very hard not to be.

I kept eating my own small piece of bread, entirely oblivious, and remarked to the woman next to me that the fruit had turned out sweeter than I expected. She agreed, in a voice that had gone soft and a little breathless in a way it hadn't been a moment before, and then didn't say anything else at all, just looked at me for a beat too long before turning her attention, very deliberately, to someone else nearby.

It spread the way warmth spreads through a room when someone opens a door to somewhere much hotter than where you're standing -- not all at once, but steadily, person to person, until what had been an ordinary gathering around a fire had become something else entirely, charged and restless and increasingly difficult to ignore even for someone as slow on the uptake as I apparently was. Two women who I don't think had exchanged more than a polite greeting all evening were suddenly deep in a conversation conducted almost entirely through eye contact, sitting rather closer together than the bench strictly required. Someone laughed, too loud, at something that hadn't been very funny, and pressed a hand flat against her own collarbone as though checking whether her heart was actually beating as fast as it felt like it was. I remember looking around, genuinely puzzled, wondering if everyone had simply had an unusually good day, before it occurred to me -- finally, embarrassingly late -- to wonder whether it had anything to do with the small red fruit currently being passed to yet another woman by the hearth.

By then it was already much too late to wonder quietly.

4.3 -- Ilyrisse Makes a Phone Call, Metaphorically

Ilyrisse found me not long after, and I want to be clear that even in the middle of what was rapidly becoming an enormous, glowing-eyed, increasingly handsy situation spanning half her crystal halls, she looked exactly as composed as she always looks -- the same unhurried, regal calm, as though dozens of women suddenly overcome with an overwhelming and highly specific kind of appetite were simply Tuesday.

"Flora," she said, in the tone of someone confirming a minor scheduling conflict rather than a magical catastrophe. "Tell me about the fruit."

"It was my Mission reward," I said, already suspecting, from her face, that I had done something. "It's -- I don't actually know what it does. I just thought it looked nice."

"It looked nice," Ilyrisse repeated, glancing over her shoulder at a scene that had, by this point, escalated well past anything that could be described as looking nice. Somewhere behind her, two women who I was fairly sure had never spoken a single word to each other before that morning were now very much making up for lost time, tangled together on one of the long benches, foreheads pressed together, murmuring things I decided very firmly not to try and overhear. Someone else had apparently decided clothing was an unnecessary formality roughly forty minutes ahead of schedule. A third pair had abandoned the game of painted stones entirely, the little pieces scattered forgotten across the floor, in favor of a much less strategic activity involving a great deal of giggling and at least one dropped shawl. "It is, I would say, working exactly as intended, whatever intention birthed it. I don't suppose your Mission told you what the fruit was for."

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

"No. Just that it grew from the plants I was tending."

"Of course it did." She said this with the specific, long-suffering patience of a woman who has clearly decided that the fastest route through a crisis is simply accepting it has already happened. She closed her eyes for a moment -- I want to say in exasperation, though with Ilyrisse it's always a little hard to be sure if exasperation and amusement look meaningfully different -- and then reached, in the particular way she reaches for things when she wants Eremos specifically and immediately, for whatever invisible thread connects the two of them.

I don't know exactly what she said to him, wherever he was. I only know that a few minutes later he arrived through the crystal doors looking like a man who had been told, with great economy of words, that his afternoon plans had changed dramatically and without his input, and one look around the hall told him everything Ilyrisse apparently hadn't bothered explaining.

"There are a lot more of you than usual," he said, to no one in particular, sounding genuinely a little faint.

"Flora made fruit," Ilyrisse said, entirely deadpan, gesturing at the chaos radiating outward from the hearth like she was presenting him with a particularly complicated tax document. "It appears to have a very specific effect. You should also know three new arrivals wandered in during the last half hour looking for a quiet place to sit and got, regrettably, swept up in things almost immediately. I've counted at minimum several thousand women currently affected, several hundred of whom are, at this exact moment, actively looking for you."

"Several thousand," Eremos repeated, in the voice of a man doing very fast, very unwelcome arithmetic.

"I would round up, if I were you," Ilyrisse said. "I generally find it's wiser to overestimate this sort of thing."

He looked, for one long moment, like a man calculating the physical impossibility of what was being asked of him against the much larger, much more immediate fact of several hundred extremely affectionate women already turning in his direction with an enthusiasm that suggested waiting politely for an explanation was not currently on anyone's agenda. I watched every last trace of composure drain out of his face, replaced by the specific expression of someone accepting his fate.

"I am going to need," he said, with tremendous, weary dignity, "a very long time."

"You have all night," Ilyrisse said, entirely unbothered, already turning to walk away as though she had somewhere far more interesting to be. "I'd start soon, if I were you. I hear this sort of thing only compounds."

I want to try, here, to describe what the rest of that evening looked like from where I stood, because I think it deserves a little more than the joke I made of it at the time, even though the joke was, honestly, well-earned.

He went to them one at a time, the way he goes to everything, patient in a way that I don't think anyone who first meets him quite expects from something that used to be an entire plant. The first was the tall, sharp-featured woman I'd noticed earlier, still stiff with the effort of holding some old formal composure together even as the fruit clearly had other ideas -- he simply walked to her, unhurried, and took both her hands in his, and said something low enough that I couldn't hear it, and whatever it was made her exhale, all at once, like a held breath finally allowed out, before she wound her arms around his neck and pressed her face into his shoulder with a kind of relief that had nothing performative in it at all. The younger-looking one who'd been fanning herself earlier practically launched herself at him the moment he turned toward her, and he laughed -- actually laughed, warm and a little rueful, the sound of a man who has clearly done this exact dance more than once -- and caught her easily, murmuring something that made her blush even harder and bury her face against his chest instead of answering.

He kissed foreheads. He kissed the crowns of heads, and the backs of hands, and, more than once, simply pulled someone in close and held them there, rocking slightly, the way you'd calm anything overwhelmed and a little frightened by its own sudden intensity of feeling -- because that's what it was, underneath all the giggling and the blushing and the increasingly enthusiastic proposals being made in every direction. It wasn't only appetite. It was need, dressed up loud, and he met each version of it exactly the way it needed meeting, unhurried, unbothered by how long the line behind each woman was growing, as though the entire rest of existence could simply wait its turn.

I watched one particularly striking woman with hair like spun silver-blue try to explain, with enormous dignity, that she was absolutely not affected by anything as embarrassing as fruit, thank you, while very obviously failing to let go of his sleeve the entire time she said it, and I had to turn away and bite the inside of my cheek so hard it nearly hurt, because laughing at that exact moment would have been deeply unkind, however much I wanted to.

I would like to say, in my own defense, that I felt appropriately guilty about all of this. I did feel a little guilty. Mostly, though, standing there watching the single most composed man I have ever known visibly resign himself to an evening of extraordinary, undignified labor, one woman at a time, with the weary good humor of a man who has clearly, somewhere along the way, made peace with exactly this kind of chaos being a permanent feature of loving as many people as he does, I had to bite down very hard on the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing outright, and I am fairly sure I did not entirely succeed.

"You're welcome, by the way," I called out to him at one point, mostly to see what he'd do.

He shot me a look over someone's shoulder that managed to be both deeply affectionate and deeply put-upon at exactly the same time. "I am going to need several days off after this," he said. "Possibly a week. Possibly longer, depending on how many more of you decide tonight is the night to finally introduce yourselves."

"I'll bring snacks," I offered, entirely too pleased with myself.

"Don't," he said, with real feeling, "you dare."

4.4 -- What Flora Realized Too Late

It occurred to me properly only afterward, once the hearth had mostly cleared out and the crystal halls had settled back into something closer to their usual gentle chaos, exactly what I had done. I sat with the last uneaten heart-shaped fruit still resting in my palm, turning it over, feeling my face heat with a very particular kind of mortification that had nothing to do with cold and everything to do with suddenly understanding, in hindsight, precisely why my Mission had handed me that shape and not some other.

I thought about the night it must have come from. I didn't let the thought go any further than that -- some things you recognize and then, very deliberately, set back down without picking all the way up -- but I understood, at least, that whatever had happened between Eremos and me that particular night had been intense enough, wanting enough, to leave some mark the world itself had decided to remember. I didn't know, yet, what that meant about how this world actually worked. I only knew that I was equal parts mortified and, if I'm being completely honest with myself, a little bit proud. There's something almost sweet, once the mortification settles, about discovering that a feeling you had, once, privately, in the dark, was real enough that an entire garden grew fruit shaped around the memory of it. I don't think I'll ever be able to eat one again without blushing at least a little. I've decided I don't mind that.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!