The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

8.1 — A Debt Too Large for Mercy

"This one," Eremos said, "rises rarely, and only under a specific and narrow set of circumstances — when a wrong has been done that is too large, too structural, too woven into the ordinary unfairness of how the Between distributes its rewards and its cruelties, for the ordinary version of me to know how to answer honestly."

"I do not, in the ordinary run of things, sit in judgment of anyone," he said. "I have never wanted that role, and I have actively avoided it, across centuries of watching syndicates and appraisers and the whole vast, uneven machinery of this world's economy operate according to rules I have never fully agreed with. But there have been moments — rare, specific, genuinely earned moments — where something in me rises to answer an injustice not with fury, and not with destruction, but with something closer to an absolute, unbending demand that the scales be made even, regardless of what it costs to make them so."

"Kael would recognize this one," Vaelira said, with a small, private smile, "better than almost anyone else in this household, though he's never met him directly. His own gift, the one I tested so thoroughly the day we met, is a distant cousin of what rises in Eremos in this state — an insistence that fairness be enforced, applied with total conviction and total certainty. The difference is that Kael's version is gentle, almost naive in its faith that fairness is simple. Eremos's version has no such naivety left in it."

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"We named him the Impartial," Ilyrisse said, "because that is, in the end, exactly what he is. He does not favor me, or any of us, in his judgments, any more than he favors the wronged party over the wrongdoer if the wronged party has also, in some way, contributed to the injustice. He simply weighs, with total and unbending precision, and delivers whatever the weighing demands, regardless of whose feelings that verdict happens to spare or wound."

8.2 — What He Carries

"In power," Eremos said, "the Impartial amplifies perception more than force — an almost total clarity about cause and consequence, about who actually bears responsibility for a given harm and in what proportion, cutting through whatever excuses or manipulations might otherwise obscure the truth of a situation. Where he acts, he acts with a precision none of my other states can match, applying exactly the correction a situation demands and not one measure more or less."

"He is the version of me I trust most, in situations that call for judgment rather than force," he said, "and the version I am, in a strange way, least afraid of, because he has never once, in all the centuries I have carried him, been wrong."