The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Movement One — The Words Before the Waking

What I heard was, cut off his head.

I want to tell you, honestly, before anything else, that I don't know how pain feels. I don't know how dying feels either, not properly, not from the inside, the way a soul who once lived a mortal life would know it, carried forward into the Between the way a scar is carried forward on a wrist. I have never died. I have only ever grown, and then stopped growing, and then, eventually, learned to walk around in a shape that isn't mine, borrowed the way you might borrow a coat that fits well enough not to complain about, and I had assumed, for longer than I can properly measure, that this made me a poor judge of suffering. A plant does not know what it is to bleed. It only knows what it is to be cut, and even that, I had always believed, without ever needing to lower the belief far enough to test it, must be a gentler thing than whatever it is that makes a man scream the way the men around me were screaming.

But the begging did something to me. That's the honest shape of it. Not the sound alone — though the sound was doing plenty on its own, arriving from every direction at once, low and high and cracked in the middle, the specific ragged pitch of a throat that has already been screaming longer than any throat should reasonably be asked to — but the begging itself, the content of it, the desperate, repetitive shape every plea seemed to fold itself into, made me understand something before I understood anything else. We were not in the Between.

I want that understood clearly, because I think it matters more than almost anything else I'm about to tell you. The Between does not sound like this. The Between, for all its gray and all its distance and all the ordinary loneliness it hands out so freely to whoever arrives inside it, is quiet in a particular way — a held, patient quiet, the quiet of a place that has already finished deciding nothing terrible needs to happen inside it anymore. This was not that. This had the specific, ugly texture of a place still actively deciding, over and over, that something terrible should keep happening, right now, and then again a moment after that, and I am a plant, or I was one, or some very old and very stubborn part of me has simply refused, across every century since, to stop being one — and a plant, faced with a fact like that, does not waste time being surprised by it. It simply registers the fact. Here is where I am. Here is what is happening here. Proceed accordingly.

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The last thing I remembered, before all of this, was glass.

Not ordinary glass. Ilyrisse's glass — the tall, ancient panes of her castle, the ones that had stood since before I'd fully learned to hold this shape without effort, catching light that had no business being caught so beautifully in a world this gray. I remembered a sound I didn't have a name for yet, a sound like the whole world clearing its throat, and then a spreading white fracture racing across a surface that had never once, in all the centuries I'd known it, shown a single crack. I remembered reaching for something — I couldn't tell you now what, a hand, a shoulder, the back of a chair, something solid enough to hold on to while the floor stopped agreeing to be a floor — and then I remembered nothing at all. A held breath with no exhale attached to it. And then this. Whatever this was.

I was weak. That much I could tell you with some confidence, even before I understood anything else about where I'd landed. Weak in a way I don't think I'd ever properly been weak before, not in this shape, not in any shape — a heaviness sitting low in whatever this body currently was, a fog sitting somewhere behind my own eyes, thick enough that even simply keeping them open felt, for a moment, like an effort worth reconsidering.

So I didn't open them further than I had to. I let the sound arrive first, the way you let a room introduce itself to you in the dark before you go reaching for a lamp. And what arrived, before anything else, was that single sentence, repeated somewhere close by in a voice that had already, clearly, said it more than once that morning.

Cut off his head.