The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

The heart beats. The blood runs hot. And my words, tonight, will come dressed in the fire of whatever truths I can still bear to write down.

I want to be honest with you about that sentence before I let it stand, because I know exactly how strange it must sound, coming from a place like the Between. There is no body here. Not truly — not the ordinary architecture of a heart that beats or blood that runs, the way it once did, back when I was only a woman and not yet whatever this crown has made of me since. What I mean by it is something else. A feeling shaped like a body, borrowed from memory, worn because the alternative — writing with no feeling attached to the words at all — has never once, in all my long existence, felt honest enough to trust.

I am sitting where I always sit, on the nights this particular restlessness finds me — the low stone bench beneath the tallest of the conservatory's glass panes, where Iris keeps her one patch of real, living earth, and where the castle's borrowed moonlight falls thin and silver across whatever page I've decided to trouble tonight. The book itself is old. Older than most things I still own outright, its spine worn soft from handling, its pages carrying the particular faint, warm smell that only paper this well-loved ever manages to keep. I do not remember, precisely, when I began keeping it. I remember only that it has always felt safer, somehow, than speaking — a place where the Empress of Eternity is permitted to simply be a tired woman, without an audience, without a household waiting on the other side of the door to see whether her composure holds.

There is a particular clarity that comes from writing rather than simply thinking. I have always found this to be true, in Something and in the Between both. A thought, left loose inside the mind, is a slippery thing — it doubles back on itself, contradicts what it said a moment before, forgives itself too easily for whatever cowardice it's currently indulging. A thought written down cannot do that, not without the hand that holds the pen noticing the contradiction as it happens. So tonight, under whatever passes for moonlight in this gray, borrowed sky, I have decided to write rather than simply think. I owe myself, I believe, at least that much honesty.

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The candle beside me has burned low enough that its light barely reaches the far corner of this bench, and I find I do not particularly wish to call for another. There is something in the dimness that suits tonight's entry better than a fuller light would — the particular privacy of writing by a flame small enough that even the page itself has to lean close to be read properly. Beyond the glass, the Between's own borrowed moon hangs exactly where it always hangs, unmoving, patient, offering no more warmth than it ever offers, and yet tonight, for reasons I cannot fully account for, its cold light feels almost companionable. Perhaps grief simply prefers company that asks nothing of it in return.

I have not eaten properly in two days. I note this here only because I promised myself, beginning this entry, that I would write the whole truth rather than the comfortable portion of it, and I think a woman who claims total composure while quietly starving herself of ordinary care does not deserve the word composure at all. Vaelira noticed, at dinner. She said nothing about it directly — she rarely does, when the noticing would embarrass either of us — but she filled my plate a second time without asking, and watched, out of the corner of her eye, until I had at least made a reasonable show of eating it. I do not know what I would do without her particular, sideways kind of care. I suspect I have never properly told her so.