The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

3.1 -- A World That Didn't Bother Finishing Itself

I landed in a pocket-world that had clearly not been built with much ambition.

That's not a complaint, exactly -- I've been in worse, and I understand well enough by now that Missions only build as much detail as the objective actually requires. This one needed a patch of soil, low stone walls on two sides, a sky that hadn't been given more than the barest suggestion of color, and a scattering of plants I did not recognize at all. No name surfaced when I looked at them. No memory of them from anywhere in my long, quiet plant-life on the hill. Just green things, low and unformed, waiting for someone to help them finish becoming whatever they were supposed to become.

The walls themselves told me almost as little as the sky did. Pale stone, unweathered, the kind that hadn't been given enough history to crack or moss over the way real walls do when they've stood somewhere long enough to matter. They stopped, both of them, at a height just past my shoulders, and past their edges the world simply thinned out into an unfinished gray, the same texture as the rest of the Between's endless open distances, as though whoever -- whatever -- built this Mission had only bothered rendering the part directly relevant to the task and left everything else to fade politely into background. I walked the perimeter once, slowly, the way I always do when I land somewhere new, more out of habit than suspicion. There wasn't much to see. A garden, half-grown, waiting. Walls that went nowhere. A sky that hadn't finished deciding what color it wanted to be.

Tend these until they reach maturity. That was the whole of it. No further detail, no explanation of what they were for, or who wanted them, or why maturity mattered enough to build an entire Mission around it. I've decided, over time, not to mind this the way I once might have. The world gives you exactly as much as it thinks you need, and in this case, apparently, that was: water them, watch them, wait.

I liked it immediately, if I'm honest. There's something in me -- I don't think it will ever entirely leave, and I don't want it to -- that still responds, instantly and without effort, to the simple work of tending something growing. I knelt down in that thin gray soil and started, without needing to be told twice how.

It's strange, the particular kind of love I still carry for things like this. I've thought about it more than once, kneeling in some half-built garden or another, hands in dirt that isn't quite real dirt, water conjured from nothing pooling gently at the base of a stem that doesn't yet know its own name. I loved the sun once with a devotion I don't think any word properly holds -- the plain, wordless, whole-body kind of love that doesn't require understanding what you're loving, only turning toward it, every single day, because turning toward it is the entire shape of what you are. I still love the world that way, underneath everything I've since become. I love the Between the way I once loved the sky. Not because it's kind to me, though it has been, more than I ever expected anything to be, but simply because I'm in it, and it's here, and some old, patient, rooted part of me has never stopped being grateful just for the chance to keep growing toward whatever light happens to be nearest.

I worked through the first stretch of that day happily enough, humming a little, the way I do when nobody's listening. I watered what needed watering. I pulled a few thin, hungry weeds that had sprung up between the rows, apologizing to them under my breath even as I did it, because some habits from being voiceless and rootbound never fully leave a person, and one of mine is feeling, faintly, guilty about undoing anything that grew, even a weed, even something that wasn't supposed to be there.

3.2 -- Something Was Already Wrong

It took a while before I noticed anything off. I want to be honest about that too, because it would be easy to tell this story as though I'd sensed danger from the very first moment, and that isn't true. I was happy. I was tending plants in the quiet, unbothered way I like best, and for a good long while nothing about the pocket-world gave me any reason to think twice.

The first thing that snagged, faintly, was the quiet. Not the ordinary quiet of an empty pocket-world -- I know that quiet well, it has a texture to it, a kind of held-breath stillness that comes from a place built and then simply left, waiting for whoever was assigned to it to finish and leave again. This was a different kind of quiet. Heavier. The kind of quiet that comes right before something, rather than the kind that comes from nothing at all.

Then I found the tracks. Not human, not anything with two legs -- long, dragging prints pressed deep into the thin soil near the low stone wall, more of them than felt right for whatever had made them, moving in a pattern that didn't look like wandering. It looked like circling.

I remember standing there for a moment, one hand still resting against a half-grown stem, feeling something in my chest go very still and very alert all at once -- the specific, sharpened attention I've gotten better at trusting since everything that happened back in that story I told Eremos, once, about the night I fell apart and put myself back together with his help. I didn't know yet what was coming. I just knew, the way you know weather is changing before the sky has fully committed to it, that something was.

3.3 -- Six

They came out of the gray at the edges of the garden all at once, which I think was the worst part -- not a slow approach, not a warning, just suddenly there, six of them, where a moment before there had been nothing at all.

Wolves, or something built along the same lines as wolves, if wolves had been assembled by a world that only bothered sketching the essential shape of the idea rather than filling in every detail. Gaunt. Starving, in the specific, visible way that made my stomach turn even before fear caught up with the rest of me -- ribs pressed tight against dull fur, eyes too large in faces gone hollow, the low, exhausted posture of things that have been hungry for days and days with nothing at the end of any of those days to show for it. There was blood on a few of them already, old and dark, not mine, evidence of some earlier hunger that hadn't been enough either.

I understood, standing there with six sets of eyes fixed on me, exactly what I was looking at, and it wasn't cruelty. It wasn't malice. It was just hunger, the plainest and oldest kind, dressed up in a shape sharp enough to be dangerous regardless of what was or wasn't behind it. I remember feeling, even in that first frozen second, a strange double pull -- fear on one side, and underneath it, quieter, something closer to grief, for whatever hollow, half-built corner of this world had produced six starving things and then simply left them here to go on being hungry, with nothing to eat but whatever wandered into their circling.

And underneath that understanding, quieter, colder, sat the other thing, the thing I don't think I'd ever let myself sit with quite this plainly before: if this went wrong, if I made even one mistake here, in this thin, half-built pocket of Nothing that barely counted as a world at all -- that would be it. Not a story I'd get to tell later, over dinner, with everyone laughing at how frightened I'd been. Not a lesson. There is no revival waiting on the other side of a Mission gone wrong, not the way there's supposed to be one waiting on the other side of an ordinary mortal death, not the myth of a Time Fragment nobody has ever confirmed even works. If I died here, in this garden nobody had bothered finishing, I would simply stop. However this went, it would be the only version of it that ever happened.

I don't think I'd ever understood, quite that clearly, quite that all the way down into my chest, what it actually meant that I could disappear. Not fade, the slow way souls sometimes do when they go too long without a Mission. Just -- stop. Here. Now. Over six starving animals in a garden that didn't even have a proper sky.

It's a strange thing, being afraid, when you spent the first long stretch of your existence as something that couldn't be afraid at all. A flower doesn't fear the frost that kills it. It doesn't know enough about itself, or about endings, to build a feeling around the possibility of one. I spent an age of the universe like that -- rootbound, wordless, incapable of dreading anything, because dread requires a mind that understands it has something to lose, and I didn't have one yet. I have one now. And standing there, feeling my own heartbeat for what felt like the first time in my whole strange, borrowed life, I understood, all at once, exactly what I'd been spared for so long and exactly what I now had to carry instead: the specific, cold, wide-awake knowledge that I was a thing capable of ending, and that ending, once it happened, would not be undone by anyone, least of all by me.

I thought of Eremos. I thought of the particular way he says my name, unhurried, like it's worth taking his time over. I thought, absurdly, of Iris's kiss on my cheek not an hour before, still faintly warm if I let myself imagine it was, and of how unfinished everything would feel, how unfair, if the last thing I ever did was fail to finish a garden nobody had even bothered naming. And then I stopped thinking, because there wasn't room left for it, and I did the only thing I actually know how to do, all the way down in whatever is left in me of the thing I used to be before I had a name at all.

I reached for the ground.

3.4 -- What a Flower Remembers About Roots

I don't fully know how to explain what happened next, even to myself, even now with time to sit and put it into careful words instead of living it in the space of a few desperate seconds. I only know that something in me that has never fully stopped being a plant, no matter how long I've walked and talked and loved and been loved since, answered before the rest of me had finished being afraid.

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The half-grown stems I'd spent the last stretch of time tending -- the ones I'd been tending, tenderly, with no more urgency than you'd give any small green thing you liked the look of -- responded to something in me the way nothing mortal ever could. I don't have better words for it than roots. Roots erupting up out of the thin gray soil where there shouldn't have been enough structure to hold them, vines uncoiling fast and sudden between me and the nearest of the six, not attacking, not yet, just rising, a wall of green where a moment before there had been nothing but empty ground.

The nearest wolf lunged the instant the first vine broke the surface, faster than I'd braced for, and I felt the impact of it glance off my raised forearm instead of my throat only because some instinct older than thought had already turned my body half a step sideways before my mind caught up to deciding to move at all. Its teeth closed on nothing but air and the trailing edge of my sleeve, and I felt, more than heard, the frustrated snarl that followed, close enough that its breath -- hot, ragged, smelling of old blood and older hunger -- brushed against my cheek before it fell back to circle again.

It bought me a breath. Just one. But one was enough to remember that I am not the silent, rootbound thing I once was on that colorless hill, waiting for a sun that never came close enough to touch. I have hands now. I have a voice, even if I've never learned to use it for anything as violent as this. And I have, underneath everything soft and unassuming about me, an old, patient, stubborn kind of strength that has nothing to do with speed or cruelty and everything to do with simply refusing, all the way down, to stop growing toward the thing that keeps me alive.

Two more came at me from either side while I was still finding my footing, and I remember, with a clarity that frightens me a little even now, understanding exactly how close that particular moment came to being the last thing I ever understood. I threw myself down and sideways, hard, into the soil I'd spent the whole day tending, and felt a second set of jaws snap shut a hand's width from where my leg had been a heartbeat earlier. The vines caught that one mid-lunge, wrapping fast around a foreleg already off-balance from the miss, hauling it sideways into the low stone wall with a heavy, awful sound that I still don't like remembering. It didn't get back up right away. I don't know if I hurt it badly. I try, now, not to think too hard about that part.

I won't pretend I remember every part of what happened next with perfect clarity. It runs together, the way I understand real danger always does, into a blur of movement and green and my own ragged breathing -- the vines moving faster than vines should move, wrapping and pulling, using the wolves' own hunger-driven momentum against them, tangling legs, forcing two of them back hard enough that they yelped and scattered rather than press the attack. I remember one getting close enough that I felt claws catch and tear along my forearm, a thin, bright line of pain that didn't fully register as pain until afterward, and I remember shoving it back bodily with both hands buried in its matted fur, more instinct than strategy, more refusal than skill. I remember the garden itself seeming to lean toward me, the way a plant leans toward light, as though some quiet agreement had passed between me and the half-grown things I'd spent the last stretch of time caring for -- you kept me alive, now I'll return the favor. I remember the specific, fierce clarity of understanding, in the middle of all of it, that I was not going to disappear here. Not today. Not over this.

It wasn't graceful. I don't think I did anything a real fighter would recognize as skill. My hands were shaking even while they were moving. My breath came in short, torn gasps that had nothing composed about them at all. But it worked. One by one, the six of them broke off -- not all at once, not in some clean, decisive victory, but the way exhausted, starving things retreat when the cost of continuing finally outweighs whatever hunger drove them here in the first place. The last one held longest, watching me with something that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite fear either, just the flat, tired calculation of a creature deciding whether today was the day it died trying. It wasn't. It turned, eventually, and loped off into the gray at the garden's edge, and then I was alone again, breathing hard, hands still buried wrist-deep in soil gone strange and warm from whatever had just moved through it, the shallow cut along my forearm stinging in the sudden, ringing quiet.

I sat there for a long moment afterward, just breathing, feeling my own heartbeat the way you feel it after nearly losing the chance to feel it at all -- too fast, too loud, almost embarrassingly grateful just for the fact of it continuing.

3.5 -- The Garden Finishes Blooming

It took the rest of that day, by whatever measure of days a pocket-world like that one keeps, for the plants to finish what they'd started. I stayed with them the whole time, even after the danger had passed, even after I could have simply waited somewhere safer for the Mission's timer to run its course. I didn't want to leave them alone. Not after what they'd just done for me, whether or not they understood, in whatever dim vegetable way a thing like that understands anything, that they'd done it at all.

I talked to them while I worked, the way I used to imagine, long ago, someone might talk to me. Small things. Nothing important. I told them they'd done well. I told them I was proud of how far they'd come, even though I had no idea, really, what they were or what growing all the way meant for something like them. I don't think it matters whether they could hear me. I think it mattered that I said it anyway.

By the time the light in that half-built sky started to fade toward whatever passed for evening there, the garden had filled in properly -- full-grown now, whatever they were, healthy and green and entirely unbothered by the violence that had nearly ended in the middle of them just hours before. I felt, kneeling there in soil that no longer looked strange at all, something very close to peace.

I let myself sit with it a while longer than I strictly needed to, once the tending was done and there was nothing left to do but wait for the Mission's timer to release me back to wherever I'd come from. I thought, a little, about how far I'd come from that first hill -- how strange it still is, some days, to realize I'm the kind of thing now that can be frightened, and hurt, and come out the other side of both still standing. I don't think I would trade that hill back, even on the days when being a person costs more than being a flower ever did. A flower doesn't get afraid, but a flower also never gets to feel the particular relief of a held breath finally let go, the specific gladness of having protected something with your own two hands instead of simply enduring whatever the sky decided to send down that day. I think I'll take the fear, on balance, if it comes bundled together with everything else I've gained instead of it.

I thought, too, about the crystal halls waiting for me back at Ilyrisse's Fragment -- how strange and wonderful it still feels, most days, that I have somewhere like that to go home to at all. I remember, early on, feeling almost guilty accepting a place there, as though warmth like that had to be earned rather than simply offered, the way nothing ever had been offered to me on my hill without my having to reach for it first, alone, for centuries, before anyone noticed I was reaching. It took me longer than I like admitting to understand that Ilyrisse's halls were never conditional on anything at all -- that I could walk in tired, or frightened, or covered in garden dirt and a shallow claw-mark along one arm, and still be handed a place by the hearth without anyone asking me to explain myself first. I think that's the thing I love most about this strange, sprawling family Eremos built without meaning to build it. Nobody there has ever once made me feel like I had to earn my own belonging.

I stood, eventually, brushed the last of the soil from my knees, and let the Mission's timer finish its count, feeling the world begin, gently, to fold itself back toward wherever it was about to send me.

3.6 -- A Fruit Shaped Like a Heart

The Mission's reward arrived the way rewards always arrive -- a knowledge, sudden and complete, settling into some part of my mind that hadn't held it a moment before. Not an object handed to me. An ability. The knowledge of how to shape fruit from nothing, the way some souls can shape whole meals out of memory and will -- except mine came out wrong, or different, or maybe exactly right in a way I didn't understand yet, because every single fruit I tried to make came out shaped like a heart.

I made the first one carefully, curious, cupping both hands together the way you'd hold something newly hatched. It formed slowly, gathering itself out of nothing the way I imagine frost gathers on a cold morning, one fine thread of substance at a time, until there was weight in my palms where a moment before there had only been air. It was small, a little smaller than my own closed fist, skin a deep, warm red that caught what little light that unfinished sky offered and gave it back doubled, glossy and soft-looking, faintly ribbed along one curved side the way a real heart might be if a real heart were also, somehow, sweet enough to eat. It was warm. Not hot, not uncomfortably so, just warm the way bread is warm fresh out of an oven, or the way a hand is warm right after it's been held.

I turned it over once in my palms, admiring it the way you admire anything you've just discovered you can make. It smelled faintly of something I couldn't quite place -- not quite the sweetness of the preserved fruit Iris and I had traded for that morning, something rounder than that, warmer, closer to the smell of skin against skin than to anything that grows on a branch. I didn't think much of that detail at the time. I filed it away, distantly, the way you file away any small strangeness that doesn't seem worth chasing down right that moment.

I made a second one. Then a third, mostly because I liked the feeling of it forming in my hands, that same small private thrill I still get from watching anything grow under my own care. By the fourth, I'd started laughing a little at myself, standing alone in a half-finished garden with an armful of small red hearts, thinking that whatever the world had decided to give me this time, it had at least given me something pretty.

I remember, with the clarity of hindsight, standing there in the fading light with a small red fruit sitting in my open palm, perfectly formed, absurdly sentimental-looking for something the world had apparently decided I deserved after nearly being torn apart by six starving wolves. I didn't think much of it beyond that, not really, not in the moment. I thought it was sweet, in the way this whole strange world can sometimes be sweet in exactly the moments you least expect it. I didn't let myself wonder, not really, why my mind had reached for that shape instead of any other. I have a suspicion now, looking back, about a certain night with Eremos not long before, a night more intense than most, born out of nothing more than wanting, so badly, to feel like enough. I didn't make that connection at the time. I just made a few more of the fruit, tucked them carefully into the fold of my dress, and felt pleased with myself the whole way home.

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