Movement Eight — What Iris Remembers, When She Lets Herself

I want to take you somewhere else for a moment, before we return to the room where Flora and Iris are still standing, because I think it matters, understanding what Iris was actually thinking about underneath the fable she'd just finished telling.

She remembers the hill. I don't think she has ever stopped remembering the hill, not for one single moment across all the centuries since — the colorless slope, the seed rooted silent in gray dirt that had never once held anything green before it, the particular, total stillness of a thing that had not yet learned it was allowed to want. She had watched it the way you watch something you don't yet understand you're going to love, curious in a register she had never once felt before, not in the whole unmeasured span of her existence up to that point. She had total knowledge of everything. She had never once, before that hill, felt the specific, destabilizing pleasure of not immediately knowing what she was looking at.

I want to tell you what that first meeting actually looked like, rather than simply telling you that it happened, because I think the scene itself carries more weight than any summary of it ever could.

She had watched him from a distance for longer than idle interest should have lasted — an age of the universe, by the account she has since given Ilyrisse, though even Iris admits the measurement is imprecise, since nothing about that hill obeyed ordinary time the way the rest of existence obeys it. She watched a seed take root in soil that had never held anything, watched the first faint tremor of intention move through something that had not yet earned the right to be called alive by any definition smaller souls would recognize. She had never once, in the whole of her total knowledge, needed to wait for anything. Waiting was, for her, an entirely new sensation, and she found, to her own considerable surprise, that she did not dislike it.

When she finally let herself be seen — the only time in her whole existence she had ever chosen visibility over the total, comfortable anonymity she'd always known before — she did it plainly, without ceremony, simply allowing the seed's dim, half-formed awareness to register her presence the way it might register a change in light. She had expected, if she'd expected anything at all, that whatever looked back at her would recoil, the way everything else in existence recoils from her the instant it understands what it's looking at. Recognition has always, for her, been indistinguishable from fear. It is the one constant she has never once, across the whole of her existence, found an exception to.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

He did not recoil. He simply looked back at her — or did whatever the equivalent of looking was, for a rootbound thing with no eyes yet to look with — and asked her, in the halting, unpracticed way of something learning language for the very first time, what she remembered.

Not who she was. Not what she wanted, or what she intended to do to him, or whether she meant him harm — the questions any sensible, self-preserving creature would have asked first. He asked her what she remembered, the same patient, attentive question he would go on asking nearly everyone who ever crossed into his life afterward, the same question he would later ask a girl who used to be a flower, and a girl who used to be a philosopher too proud to admit she was lonely.

She told him she'd been a flower. The smallest, gentlest lie she has ever told, chosen specifically because it was the shape a former plant-soul would recognize and never think to doubt. She has told me, once, in a rare unguarded moment I do not think she intended anyone to overhear, that she does not fully understand why she chose that particular lie over any other available to her — she could have told him nothing at all, and he would not have pressed. She could have told him the truth, and watched whatever happened next unfold however it unfolded. She chose, instead, to become something small enough for him to hold without either of them being destroyed by the size of what she actually was, and she has never once, in all the centuries since, regretted the choice, however much it costs her to maintain it.

He gave her the name Iris in return, with the same unthinking, tender naming reflex he'd later use on Flora, and has never once suspected the size of the mercy he performs, every single day, simply by never once asking her to prove the lie was true.

I think, standing at that mirror with Flora, telling a story about a being too large to be loved safely, Iris was thinking about that hill the entire time. I think the toy in her story and the seed on that hill are not, in her own private accounting, two separate things at all.

Iris smiled — a real smile, not the composed, careful one she wears for most of the household, but the smaller, more startled kind that catches her by surprise sometimes when Flora says something she hadn't expected to hear.

"I'll give you my turn to be with Eremos tonight," Iris said, and Flora was already halfway out of the room by the time the rest of the sentence caught up with her — "and you can moan as loud as you'd like, little sister, no one's going to judge you for it" — and Flora fled the room entirely, laughing despite the color still climbing her face, the particular fond, easy escape of someone who has learned, across her years in that household, that being teased this way is simply what it means to be loved by Iris.