The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

2.1 -- Walking Into the Garden

Ilyrisse's Fragment always takes my breath away a little, even now, even after all the times I've walked into it. I don't think that ever really stops. The crystal goes up and up until it just sort of dissolves into its own light, and the floor under your feet doesn't reflect anything the way a normal floor would -- it just holds this soft, endless glow, like walking on the surface of something that hasn't decided yet whether it wants to be water or light.

I've never toured the whole of it, not properly, though I've been coming here for what feels like a very long time now. There are wings I've only ever glimpsed from a distance -- a corridor that curves away toward some low, warm-lit rooms with a ceiling close enough to touch, meant, I think, for someone who doesn't like the open sky of the main halls; another stretch, further off, all soft draped fabric and no hard edges anywhere at all, which I've always assumed was built for someone whose hands remember things her mind decided a long time ago to forget. Nobody's ever explained these rooms to me. I don't think anybody needs to. You just understand, walking past them, that they grew there because someone needed them to, the way a tree grows a new branch toward whatever light happens to be nearest that year.

I like getting lost here, actually, when I have the time for it, which I mostly do, since none of us are ever in a hurry unless a Mission calls us away. I like following a hallway I haven't followed before just to see where the light changes color, or finding one of the smaller courtyards tucked between the larger halls, where somebody has usually left something behind -- a half-finished game, a cup that never gets cold, a book left open to whatever page felt important enough to stop on. It always feels, walking through all of it, less like visiting someone else's home and more like walking through a garden that keeps deciding, on its own, to grow a little more whenever it's needed.

There were dozens of us there that morning, scattered through the halls and the open galleries the way we usually are on a day with nothing urgent pulling anyone away. I like watching, when I first walk in -- just for a moment, before anyone's noticed I've arrived -- because it always looks a little like a garden to me, in the specific sense I understand gardens, which is maybe not the sense anyone else means when they use the word. A garden isn't just flowers standing in neat rows. A garden is a lot of different things growing at their own pace, in their own direction, all sharing the same patch of light without needing to agree on anything else.

Some of the women were clustered together near one of the long crystal windows, laughing at something one of them had said, wrapped in almost nothing at all -- just enough fabric to feel like clothing rather than its absence, tied loose and easy the way you only dress when you know, in your bones, that nothing in the room is going to hurt you. There's no danger here. Everyone here is a flower from the same garden, as I like to put it to myself, and once you've understood that all the way down, there isn't much left to cover up out of fear. Not that everyone dresses that way -- plenty of the others were covered from throat to ankle in soft, heavy layers, out of nothing more complicated than personal taste, the same way some people like their tea strong and some like it barely steeped at all. Nobody comments on it either direction. I've never once seen anyone made to feel wrong for choosing more, or for choosing less.

I still remember, a little sheepishly, how long it took me to feel easy about my own skin here. Long enough that I noticed it taking a while, which I think says something. On the hill, I never had a body I thought about at all -- I was just a shape reaching toward light, no more self-conscious about it than a stem is self-conscious about growing crooked around a stone. It was only after I learned to walk and talk and be looked at that I discovered there was such a thing as being looked at wrong, or looking wrong while being looked at, and it took me longer than I like admitting to unlearn that particular worry once I understood that no one here was measuring me against anyone else. Some days I still catch myself doing it anyway -- glancing at Ilyrisse's easy, ageless composure, or at the effortless way some of the others hold a room's attention without trying, and feeling, for half a breath, like the plainest thing in whatever garden I've wandered into. It passes quickly now. It didn't used to.

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A group near the far wall was playing some kind of game with little painted stones, the rules of which I still don't fully understand even after watching it a dozen times -- something involving turns and captured pieces and a great deal of triumphant shouting whenever someone managed a particular combination none of the rest of us could follow. Two women were arguing, cheerfully, the specific kind of arguing that's really just enjoying each other's company through the shape of a disagreement, over whether a particular strategy was clever or simply lucky. Someone was cooking something over a fire near the center hearth that never seems to need fuel, humming to herself, stirring a pot that smelled, from where I stood, like something sweet and a little smoky at once. A woman I only vaguely know by sight sat alone near one of the smaller alcoves with a book open in her lap, entirely absorbed, the kind of absorbed that makes you not want to disturb her even to say hello. Further along, near one of the tall windows, two others were trading pieces of memory back and forth -- not the formal kind, not a Mission's unlocked chronology, just small ordinary things, the taste of a fruit from a world neither of them lived in, the sound of rain on a roof neither of them would ever see again, offered gently, received gently, the particular currency that costs nothing and means everything in a place like this.

I love it here. I don't think I say that enough, even to myself.

2.2 -- How Boredom Died Here

It occurred to me, walking through all of it that morning with my arms full of traded fruit and grain, that I've genuinely never been bored since I got a body that could be bored in the first place. I used to think boredom was just a thing that happened to people, the way weather happens, unavoidable once you had enough time on your hands. It isn't, though. Not here. Not once you have even a little strength and somewhere real to spend it.

There's always something. Someone's memories worth hearing, if they're willing to share them -- some of the older souls tell stories from lives so long gone that even the shape of the world they describe sounds like myth. There's always a game somewhere, always a meal being made, always some small trinket someone won on a Mission that's good for nothing practical at all except being turned over in your hands and admired. I used to think, on my hill, that time was the heaviest thing in existence, an endless weight with nothing to set it down against. I don't think that anymore. I think time is only heavy when you have nothing to fill it with, and once you do, it stops being a weight at all and starts being something closer to a gift you keep getting handed, over and over, more of it than you'll ever need.

2.3 -- The Kiss on the Cheek

I decided, once I'd handed off the food to whoever was managing that day's shared meal, that I wanted a Mission. Not because I was bored -- I want to be clear about that, given everything I just said -- but because some days you just want to go do something with your hands, even a small something, even something as plain as tending a garden until it grows.

"You're leaving already?" Iris asked, when I told her.

"Just for a Mission. I'll be back before it's dark."

"You always say that." She said it lightly, but there was something almost fond underneath it, the way she says most things to me. She leaned in and kissed my cheek, quick and easy, the way she always does when I'm heading off somewhere -- it's become something of a ritual between us, though neither of us has ever said so out loud. I felt my face go warm anyway, the way it always does, no matter how many times she's done it.

"You don't have to do that every time," I said, not meaning it, and she just smiled the way she always smiles when I say that, like we both know I don't mean it.

"Go on, then. Go be useful." She said it with the specific warmth of an older sister sending someone off to do something small and good, and I stepped out of the crystal halls into the gray stretch of the Between beyond them, feeling the particular pull of a Mission accepted settle over me, and then the world folded, the way it always does, and I wasn't there anymore.

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