The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

The town, over time, learned to tolerate him, though tolerating is not the same as accepting. They gave him a place to sleep — the very house of the veterinarian, whose owner had died that first day along with the rest of those who had raised weapons against him, and which no one else dared claim now for fear of drawing upon themselves the same fury that had fallen on its former occupants. They let him keep the crystal in the basement, no one daring to move it a single inch from where the messiah himself had left it.

He grew up there, among people who looked at him with an uncomfortable mixture of reverence and fear, never fully accepted, never fully rejected either, occupying that strange space that can only be occupied by someone everyone is afraid to offend but no one truly wants close. He learned, little by little, the language of the two-legged beings, though he never stopped feeling, in some corner of himself, that this language belonged to a world that would never quite be fully his.

Every night, without fail, he went down to the basement. He sat by the crystal, pressed his body against the surface cold on the outside but warm within, and told his mother — even though she couldn't hear him, even though perhaps she would never hear him again — everything that had happened that day. The small triumphs, the small humiliations, the loneliness that never quite went away no matter how much the whole town treated him, in public, with a reverential respect that felt nothing, not even remotely, like the simple, unconditional love he had known running through the forest clearings beside her.

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He never saw his father again. He heard, some nights still, the distant echo of that hum crossing the sky, and knew, without needing confirmation, that the pursuit continued, somewhere in a Something too vast for him to ever fully imagine, with no sign of ending soon. He learned to live with that too, the same way he had learned to live with almost everything else in his strange and disproportionate life: without resentment, without demanding explanations he knew no one could give him, carrying the love of an absent father the same silent way he had carried, his whole childhood, the wordless love of a mother who could never tell him she loved him, but who had shown it to him, every day, with the only language she had available.