The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Flora's turn always began the same way: without ceremony.

There was no golden gauze waiting in the chest, no ritual announcing that this night belonged to her. Flora simply appeared in the World Fragment with her hands a little restless and sat down nearby — never on top of him, never claiming more space than she felt was hers, as if even after all this time she still feared taking up more room than she was owed — and waited for Eremos to notice she was already there.

That night he noticed right away, because Flora didn't sit beside him. She sat facing him.

It was a small gesture, but with her nothing was ever entirely casual; even her clumsiness carried an honesty that admitted no disguises. Sitting across from someone instead of next to them meant one thing: she wanted to watch his face while they talked. She wanted to see.

"Tonight I want to ask you something," she said, and the effort of keeping her voice from shaking was audible. "Something you haven't been asked... that no one else has asked you."

Eremos, who had been resting his head against the trunk of the nameless tree, looked at her with that calm of his that never quite finished being calm, but was rather the still surface of something deep that had learned, out of habit, not to stir.

"Ask."

Flora took a while to find the words. Not because she lacked them — if anything she had too many, piling up in a way that sometimes made her trip over herself — but because she wanted to say this right, wanted it to sound exactly as she'd felt it, not like an accusation or gossip.

"There's a story that weighs on you differently than the others," she said finally. "I don't say that because of what you've told. I say it because of what you don't tell." She looked at her hands for a moment, as if the right way to continue were written there. "When someone mentions Vesalia, even in passing, even just to ask how she's doing, something in your face changes. Very little. Almost nothing. But I..." She hesitated, then, with that plainness of hers that disarmed more than any eloquence could: "I learned to read people's postures before I learned to speak. It's the only thing I really know how to do well. And yours changes."

Eremos said nothing for a moment. It wasn't surprise that showed on his face — he'd known, perhaps always, that sooner or later someone would notice, and of all the souls who shared his life, it made sense that it would be her, the one who had learned to read the entire world through the body before she had a single word to name it with.

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"And what do you think it means?" he asked, with genuine curiosity, not defensively.

"I don't know," Flora admitted. "That's why I'm asking. I don't think it's a secret. I don't think it's something you don't want to tell. I think it's something that..." She searched for the word, found it slowly, "...hurts to tell. That it's different."

And she was right. Eremos had already told, months earlier, the story of how Vesalia came to him: the fall, the betrayal, the lost daughter, the pact to find her someday. Ilyrisse had listened to the whole thing, with Vaelira half-asleep against her side, and by the end of that night the pain had found, if not a resolution, at least a place to settle.

But there was another story. One that began after that one, not before. One about what happens when someone already loved, already chosen, already let all the way in, keeps — despite all of that — waiting for the blow.

"It's not the same story I told Ilyrisse," he said at last, slowly, like someone deciding, word by word, whether he truly wants to open a door. "That one was about how I lost her. How she was betrayed, how she died, how I found her here, undone, searching endlessly for her daughter."

"And this one?"

Eremos was quiet a moment longer. Outside the Fragment, somewhere in the Between that neither of them could see from there, the world remained gray and silent and vast. Here, under the warm light with no source, everything was different — but he knew, better than anyone, that the warmth of a place doesn't always reach far enough to warm what's inside a person.

"This one is about what happened after. When we were already together. When I already loved her, and she loved me, and we should have simply been happy, no further conditions attached." He closed his eyes for a second, like someone searching for strength in a place he isn't sure still exists. "It's about a night I almost lost her again. Not because anyone came to hurt her. But because she could no longer hold herself up."

Flora said nothing. She just moved a little closer, not quite touching him yet, giving him exactly the space he needed to begin.

"Will you tell me?" she asked, finally, with that same simplicity she used to ask everything that truly mattered to her.

Eremos nodded.

"Yes. But I'll warn you: this one doesn't end the same way the others do. There's no villain to hate by the time it's over. There's only..." he searched for the word, and found it in the same place he himself was made of, "...a person trying to survive herself."

Flora nodded slowly, and waited.

And Eremos, head resting against the tree, eyes closed, voice low, began to tell it.