The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Eremos paused here for a moment. Not because the story demanded it — he could have gone straight on to the discovery, to the moment he himself entered the scene — but because there was something he needed to say first, something he'd been wanting to confess for a while, and only now, telling this to Flora, did he find the courage to put into words.

"There's something I want to tell you," he said, sitting up a little more. "And it isn't easy to say, so let me try slowly."

Flora nodded, not rushing him.

"When I first arrived here, so long ago now that I don't even try to count it in years anymore, I was afraid. Not of danger, not of missions, not of any of that. I was afraid of being alone. I'd spent so long being a plant, voiceless, with no one truly seeing me except her" — a brief pause, the way he always named Ilyrisse when he talked about those years without quite naming her — "that once I could finally move, once I could finally speak, I did the only thing I could think of to never feel that again: I started gathering around me every soul that wanted to stay."

Flora watched him closely, not judging anything she heard, because deep down she too knew, better than almost anyone, what the fear of absolute solitude felt like.

"And it worked," Eremos went on, "in the sense that I'm not alone anymore, and haven't been for a very, very long time. But there's a price I didn't calculate at first, one I've had to accept little by little, almost always by force: I can't give all of them the same warmth I gave Ilyrisse. Or Vaelira. Or you. Or, that night, Vesalia."

"Why not?" Flora asked, not with reproach, but with that genuine curiosity that defined her.

"Because I'm not infinite," he said, with an honesty that cost him, word by word. "Even though it might sometimes seem that way, even though the Heartthread connects me to more souls than I can count, and even though I want, with all the sincerity I'm capable of, to be present for every single one of them exactly when they need it most... I can't. There are nights when a thread trembles somewhere in the world and I'm too far away, or too busy with another soul who also needs me, to get there in time. There are stories like that night, Vesalia alone on the pale stone, that I didn't even know were happening until much later, because I didn't feel the tremor until it was almost too late."

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He fell silent for a moment, looking at some indefinite point beyond the tree.

"And that's a guilt I carry, Flora. Not a guilt that paralyzes me, not one that stops me from keeping on doing what I do. But it's real. Every soul I gather around me is a silent promise I make, even though I never say it aloud: I'm going to try to be there for you. And I know, from the start, that at some point I'm going to fail that promise with someone. Not because I don't want to keep it. But because I'm one, and they are thousands, and the world is too big even for a love as big as the one I want to give them all."

Flora was quiet for a long while. When she spoke, she did it with that simplicity of hers that so often disarmed him, the same simplicity she'd used, months earlier, to admit aloud that she needed to feel in her body what she already knew in her heart.

"I waited a long time on a hill, without even knowing I was waiting for something," she said. "I didn't know how to count days. I didn't know anything else existed besides the sun and the waiting. And when you finally came, I didn't wonder, not for a single instant, why you'd taken so long. You just... arrived. And that was enough."

Eremos looked at her, and something in his expression loosened, like someone receiving a forgiveness he didn't know he'd been asking for.

"I think that's why I wanted to tell this story to you," he said, his voice a little softer. "Because you understand, better than almost anyone in my life, that patience isn't the same as resignation. That you can wait a long time, and still, when what you were waiting for arrives, not hold the delay against it. Vesalia never fully learned that. You did. And I'm not sure what makes you different, whether it's your nature, or whether you were simply lucky enough not to carry the same betrayals she did. But I admire something in you that I sometimes secretly envy: the ability not to demand more of me than I can give."

Flora smiled, a little shy, and finally moved closer, resting her head against his shoulder.

"It's not that I don't ask anything of you," she said, with a gentle humor that eased, without lessening, everything he'd just confessed. "It's that I trust that if one day you don't make it in time, it's not because you stopped loving me. It's only because the world is very big, and you only have two hands."

Eremos laughed, softly, grateful for that small breath of lightness in the middle of so much weight.

"Keep going," she asked him then, returning to the story. "I want to know what happened when you finally found her."