The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

There was a day — Eremos never managed to calculate exactly how long Vesalia had been searching without rest by then, because time in the Between bends strangely when you walk alone — when she withdrew from the whole world.

She didn't tell anyone. There was no goodbye, no warning, not even the small ritual of trading a turn with someone else, the way she had that time that unknowingly sparked Ilyrisse's curiosity. Simply, one day, Vesalia stopped being where she was expected, and walked — Eremos would piece it together later, connecting threads, following the trail every soul leaves without meaning to — to one of the most desolate corners of the entire Between: a platform of pale stone, under a uniform gray sky that never changed, in a stretch of the world so empty you could walk for days without crossing a single silhouette.

It was, perhaps, the same place where, years before, she'd broken down for the first time, the night she confessed her whole story to Eremos. Or maybe it was another place, just as gray, just as empty, because the Between was full of corners like that, built to the exact measure of anyone needing a place where no one would demand anything of them, not even the appearance of being fine.

She sat on the stone floor, knees against her chest, in the exact same posture Flora, much later, would listen to this story in without knowing it.

And there, finally, alone, with no one watching, no composure left to maintain, Vesalia stopped holding herself up.

There were no tears. Eremos was very clear about this when he explained it to Flora, because it was, perhaps, the hardest detail in the whole story: Vesalia wanted to cry, needed to cry, with a physical need almost as strong as needing to breathe — and couldn't. Not because pride stopped her, nor the habit of a lifetime spent restraining herself in front of a court. Simply, in that moment, with her soul as exhausted as it was, not even that release remained to her. The body, or what's left of a body when one is only a soul held up by an almost-undone thread, no longer had anything left to produce that relief with.

She wanted to talk. She had no one to talk to.

Not that she was alone in any literal sense — the entire Between stretched around her, with its millions of silhouettes scattered across its impossible vastness — but in that instant, in that exact corner, there wasn't a single soul nearby who could keep her company, and she hadn't wanted there to be. She'd chosen that place precisely because no one went there. Because she needed, with the same urgency she needed to cry without being able to, a place where no one could see her be this: not a fallen queen, not a mother in search of redemption, only this, a fragment of a soul too tired to keep pretending that holding on was the same as being fine.

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

Why does it all have to be this way?

It was the only question left to her, repeating on its own without her meaning it to, with no possible answer, because there was no one — no god, no fate, not even herself — to truly direct it at. It wasn't a question about her daughter, nor about the man who had let her fall, nor even about the gods who had shaped her entire life for a purpose that was never hers. It was a simpler and more terrible question than all of that: why the simple act of existing, even here, even dead, even far from all the pain that had made her, still cost so much.

She thought of Eremos. She wanted, for an instant that hurt more than everything else combined, to go find him, to let him hold her the way he knew how, the way he'd been doing since the first night she broke down in front of him in a place very much like this one.

And then she thought: what if this time it's too much?

It wasn't doubt about Eremos's love. She knew, in some part of her mind still capable of reasoning, that he wouldn't let her fall, that he wasn't like the others, that he'd already proven it hundreds of small times and a few large ones. But the fear didn't live in that reasonable part of her. It lived further down, in the same place where the instinct to count the knives lived even at the safest table, and from there it whispered to her, with the voice of two betrayals already fulfilled, that maybe this time, yes, maybe showing him this — not the already-told story of her fall, but this, the raw exhaustion, with no dignity, no strength, nothing to offer in return — would finally be too much even for him.

So she didn't go find him. She stayed there, alone, in the corner where no one demanded anything of her, precisely because demanding nothing also meant no one could be disappointed by her failing to give it.

Her soul — made, like every soul in this world, of fragments of memory held up by an ever-thinner thread — was breaking apart inside without any outward sign to show it. No silhouette passing by chance nearby would have seen more than a figure sitting still, head down. Nothing in her posture would have betrayed that, inside, something that had been holding her up since the day she arrived in this world was, at last, on the verge of giving way.

She didn't break completely. But that night she came closer to breaking than at any other moment of her existence in the Between — closer, even, than the instant she'd first confessed her whole story, because confessing, at least, had been an act of hope. This wasn't hope. This was, simply, the bottom.

And it was right then, at that exact bottom, that a silhouette who hadn't expected to find anyone stopped to look at her.