The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

The silhouette that stopped didn't say anything at first. It stood at a careful distance, watching.

In a world where no face differed from any other, where every face was the same absence of features, it had learned — as every soul learned, sooner or later, each in its own way and at its own pace — that the body spoke where the face couldn't. Posture was the only language left once everything else was lost: shoulders would say whether someone was on guard or had given up, the tilt of a back would say whether someone was still waiting for something or had stopped waiting altogether, the way someone held their own knees against their chest would say, more clearly than any words, whether someone was trying, with whatever strength they had left, not to disappear.

This particular silhouette — Eremos didn't know, when he reconstructed this scene to tell Flora, how sensitive she already was to this back then, or whether that sensitivity was sharpened later, over time, through the unwitting practice of having had to learn to read herself before she could read anyone else — had a strange gift for this. For sensing, almost without meaning to, when someone else's posture was hiding something broken underneath. Maybe it was simply that she'd been through something similar. Maybe it was only that the world, so poor in other languages, had forced her to become fluent in this one.

She approached, slowly, without asking questions yet. What a strange world, she thought, though she didn't say it aloud — a world where no one can tell one face from another, and yet, precisely because of that, everyone ends up learning to sense, with a clarity they might never have had in Something, when someone is happy, when someone is sad, when someone, without saying a word, is asking for someone else to stay.

Vesalia didn't hear her arrive, or heard her and had no strength left to react. At that point in the night, either was practically the same thing.

The silhouette sat down beside her. She asked nothing — not what's wrong?, not who are you? — because in a world without faces, those questions sometimes felt beside the point; what was needed wasn't information, but presence. And then, with a gesture that broke, without her fully realizing it, one of the firmest unspoken rules of that world — that silhouettes don't touch, that physical contact between bodiless souls was, outside of a mission or a place like the Fragment, almost impossible to sustain without it hurting in some strange way — she reached out an arm and wrapped it around Vesalia.

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It wasn't a full embrace. It couldn't be, not in that place, not with bodies made of pale light and no warmth. But it was something — a light pressure, a silent insistence, the weight of someone who had decided, without needing to explain it to herself, that this other soul shouldn't be alone one second longer.

Vesalia didn't know, in that moment, that the silhouette holding her would, much later, become someone she'd come to love like a younger sister, one more member of the strange, enormous family Eremos had been gathering around himself over the centuries. She knew none of that. She only knew that someone, without being asked, without even deserving it, or so she thought in the depths of her exhaustion, had decided to stay.

And even though Vesalia couldn't feel, in any real physical sense, any warmth from that gray, sunless world — because the Between, outside of missions and the Fragment, offered no warmth of any kind, only the cold illusion of a contact the soul recognized more by its intention than by its temperature — something in her, the instant she finally let herself fall, gave in at last to sleep.

And in that sleep — if it was sleep, if the rest of an exhausted soul could even be called that, or if it was, as Eremos always suspected without ever telling her, something closer to a memory pushing its way through on its own, without permission, from the depths of a memory she'd never finished unlocking — she saw her daughter.

Not with a defined face — no one in the Between had a face to remember, not even in dreams — but with that absolute certainty dreams sometimes have, of knowing who is who without needing to see it. Her daughter, wrapping herself around her. Not the other way around. Not the mother protecting the daughter she'd never truly been able to protect, but the daughter — imagined, dreamed, wished for with a desperation not even the dream could hide — wrapping around the mother, as if telling her, without words, the one thing Vesalia had spent her entire existence in the Between needing to hear: it's alright. You can rest. I've got you this time.

She didn't know, upon waking, whether that had been a real memory of some lost moment, or only the desperate invention of a mind too broken to go on without comfort. And in a way, Eremos would say much later, it didn't matter which of the two it was. What mattered was that, for the first time in a long time, something in her had rested.