The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Eremos fell silent for a moment, after telling all that. The Fragment, around them, remained in its perpetual dusk, the warm sourceless light falling as always on the tall grass that existed nowhere else in the Between.

Flora didn't say anything right away. She kept looking at him, in that way of hers that never hid anything, and when she finally spoke, she did it with one of those simple sentences of hers that, without meaning to, turned out devastating.

"I know what it's like to want to cry and not be able to," she said, very quietly. "When I was only a flower, before I had words, I felt something like that every time the sun left. I didn't know it was called sadness. I only knew it hurt, and that there was no way to get it out."

Eremos looked at her, and something in his chest tightened in a way he couldn't quite name. Without saying anything, without it being a planned gesture, he raised his hand and gave her two soft taps on the chest, right over the heart — the same gesture, though neither of them said it aloud, he had repeated so many times with others, as if by doing it he could realign something that telling this story always left crooked inside him.

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Flora didn't ask what it meant. She simply placed her own hand over his, holding it there a moment, letting the gesture say what no words could have said better.

"And her," Flora said, after a while. "Vesalia. What happened when she woke up? When she saw the real sun?"

Eremos smiled, a little tired, a little relieved to have finally reached the part of the story that didn't hurt.

"That," he said, "is a story that deserves to be told slowly. Not tonight. Not all at once, after everything else."

Flora nodded, without pressing, because she, better than anyone in that strange, enormous family, knew how to wait without letting the waiting turn into resentment.

"Tomorrow, then," she said simply.

"Tomorrow," he confirmed.

And they stayed like that a while longer, under the Fragment's warm light, the weight of the now-told story settling slowly between them, the way everything settles, in time, once it has finally found a safe place to rest.