The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Movement One — An Ordinary Hour

I am not going to dress this one up. Some hours in this story earn a slow build, a warning, a reason to brace yourself before you turn the page. This is not one of those hours. This is simply an afternoon in a castle made of glass, and I think it deserves to be told exactly that plainly.

The bedchamber sat at the heart of Ilyrisse's fragment, under a ceiling so clear it gave the impression of lying beneath open sky rather than beneath several hundred feet of patient crystal. Light came from nowhere in particular and everywhere at once, the way it always did in that room, pooling soft and colorless across a bed the size of a small lake. The floor beyond the bed's edge held no reflection and every reflection, pale glass drinking in whatever color passed over it and giving nothing back except a kind of hush.

Ilyrisse sat near the headboard with a book open against her knee, though she had not turned a page in some time. Her hair — pale as struck silver, unbound, which it never was outside these walls — fell loose over one shoulder, and Eremos's head rested in the hollow of her lap, one of his hands loosely curled around her ankle the way a much smaller creature might curl around something it had decided, a long time ago, it did not intend to let go of.

He had been there the better part of an hour. It was not a new arrangement, this — it was closer to weather, the kind of pattern a household stops noticing because it has always been true.

Unlawfully taken from NovelPhoenix, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"You don't get tired of this," Ilyrisse said, not quite a question, running two fingers slowly through his dark green hair, feeling the strands catch and slip against her knuckles.

"No," he said, into the fabric of her dress, muffled and entirely unbothered.

"Every day."

"Yes."

She let the silence sit a moment, the particular silence she used when she was building toward something she had already decided to say and had not yet decided how honestly to say it.

"Do you know how many times I've had to explain this to the newer souls," she said. "That I am not, in fact, holding you captive. That you simply refuse to leave my lap of your own accord, and have done so for longer than most of them have existed."

He didn't answer that one. His hand tightened, very slightly, around her ankle.

"Vaelira asked me last week," she went on, "whether I'd raised you to sit like this, or whether it happened on its own." A pause, small and deliberate. "I told her I hadn't raised you to do anything. I told her you simply grew this way, the way ivy grows toward whatever wall happens to be warmest."

Something in the shape of his shoulders changed. Not much. Enough.

"She laughed for longer than the joke deserved," Ilyrisse said. "You should know that. The whole hall heard it."