The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Caedmon came back to himself the way he always came back from turning that particular vision over — slowly, and with a specific ache behind his ribs that no amount of centuries had managed to wear smooth.

The portrait waited exactly where he'd left it, four faces in a half-circle he had never once finished deciding the true size of. The words on the wall behind it caught what little light this windowless room allowed itself. I still love them. That has never once changed, in any version the visions showed me. Only the ending does.

He sat with that a long while, the fly and the pig and the ridiculous, furious trident already fading into the particular category of memory reserved for things too strange to stay sharp for long, and let himself, finally, ask the question he had spent decades in this room specifically avoiding.

If the mountain in that fractured future was real — if some later version of the man he had chosen not to fight for a door was capable of becoming that, thoughtless and total and immovable, in defense of the very woman Caedmon himself had once loved enough to build an entire mythology of waiting around — then what, precisely, was he still waiting for.

He had told himself, across all these patient years, that the waiting was wisdom. That a man who could see favorable paths toward nearly anything in existence owed it to himself, and to the people he still loved despite every mile and every century now standing between them, to understand the shape of the danger before he walked toward it. He believed that still. He was not certain, sitting here now, that it was the whole of the truth.

The whole of the truth, or as close to it as he was willing to come this particular evening, was simpler and considerably less flattering: he was afraid. Not of the abyss specifically, though the abyss frightened him plenty on its own accounting. He was afraid of arriving, after everything, to find that the door he'd once decided not to force had long since closed on its own, that the mountain he'd glimpsed protecting Ilyrisse had grown into something so far beyond his own considerable strength that there was no longer any place left in that particular life for a man who had spent centuries deciding, alone, in a room with no window, that waiting was the same thing as patience.

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He looked at the portrait a final time that evening — at Vesalia's severe, arithmetic eyes, at Ilyrisse's younger, looser hair, at the two half-sketched faces he had worked at longest and trusted least — and found, somewhere in the accumulated weight of decades spent asking the same two unanswered questions, that he had finally run out of patience for asking them without doing anything else besides.

He stood. He did not know yet what the abyss wanted, or why it had chosen, in that fractured future, to reach for the people he loved specifically. He did not know who the woman watching from a distance had been, or what she had lost standing there unable to help. He did not know, even now, whether the ending his visions kept fracturing around was a fixed and unavoidable fact or simply the shape fear takes when a man has spent too long alone with his own imagination.

But he knew, standing in front of four unfinished faces for what he privately, quietly decided would be one of the last times he let this particular room be the whole of his answer, that he was done waiting for the visions to resolve the question for him.

There was a particular kind of arithmetic he had built his entire long existence around, without ever once naming it as such: that a man with a gift for finding favorable paths owed it to himself to wait until the path revealed itself fully before committing his weight to it. It was, he understood now, sitting with the portrait one final evening, a very comfortable kind of cowardice, dressed up carefully enough in the language of wisdom that he had never once had to look directly at what it actually was. He had spent centuries mistaking the absence of a clear path for the absence of permission to walk at all. He was not certain, any longer, that those two things had ever been the same.

He thought, one last time, of the mountain he had seen standing between Ilyrisse and whatever wanted to take her — of the plain, unglamorous fact that whatever Eremos had become in that fractured thread, he had become it without waiting for a favorable path to reveal itself first. He had simply stood, because standing was what the moment required, and let the shape of what standing cost him sort itself out afterward, if there was an afterward left to sort it out in.

Caedmon did not have that kind of courage yet, and he was honest enough with himself, in this final accounting, to admit it plainly. But he could, at least, stop mistaking his own fear for patience. He could, at least, walk.

He was going to go find them himself, and let whatever waited at the end of that road be something he met standing, rather than something he spent one more century simply imagining from the safety of a chair.

He left the cup of cold, untouched tea exactly where it sat. Some things, he decided, were not worth finishing before you walked out the door.