The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

It was only when she came across a soul near the very edge of fading — worn thin enough that its silhouette had begun, in places, to blur into the gray around it, the way a soul's shape blurs when it has gone too long without answering a single Mission and has simply stopped caring whether it continues to exist at all — that she received the answer this account thinks worth ending the search on.

She almost walked past it, at first. Fading souls are not uncommon, out in the wider reaches of the gray, and most of them have long since stopped wanting company of any kind, preferring whatever quiet they have left to a stranger's questions. But something about this one made her stop — perhaps the particular stillness of it, closer to patience than to despair, or perhaps simply the accumulated exhaustion of everything she'd been carrying since the last answer she'd collected. She sat down near it, not too close, the careful distance she'd learned to keep from anything that might startle.

The soul said nothing, at first, the way the others had all rushed to say something. It only looked at her, for a long moment, with whatever remained of its attention, the way one very old thing sometimes recognizes another. There was no fear in the look, and no particular warmth either — only a kind of tired, level appraisal, as though it were deciding whether she was worth whatever effort speaking still cost it. When it finally spoke, its voice carried the particular, worn clarity of something that has had centuries to consider its own words and has stopped wasting any of them.

"I don't know what you mean by the word," it said. "I think you and I are more alike than you'd like to admit. You've spent longer than you'll say collecting other people's certainty, because you've never trusted your own long enough to keep it. If you're asking what I believe love is, I'll tell you plainly, because I don't have the strength left to dress it in anything gentler: nothing. There is no love. There is only a concept we built, together, out of necessity — a way of naming the warmth none of us can manage to give ourselves alone."

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She asked it, quietly, whether that meant it thought love wasn't real.

"I think it's the realest thing left in a world built out of nothing," the soul said, "which is a strange thing to say about something I've just told you doesn't exist. But that's the trouble with the word, isn't it. It was never a thing to begin with. It's a bridge. You don't ask whether a bridge is real. You ask whether it's holding."

She sat with the soul a long while after that, longer than she'd sat with anyone else in the whole of her search, and when she finally rose to leave, she did not offer it the reward her Contract had promised. She suspected, and this account agrees with her, that it would not have lasted long enough to spend it.

Here, I think, is where everything this account has told you so far about love comes apart at the seams. What is love, really? Every soul she asked carried a different answer, shaped by a different life, a different grief, a different hunger. But if we have to choose one, if this account is forced to settle on the single answer that comes closest to true, I suspect it's the one the fading soul gave her: the warmth we cannot manage to give ourselves alone. The Between may be cold, and largely without sensation, but it permits speech, at least, and speech — the plain, unglamorous act of one soul reaching another with words — may be the truest warmth this gray world still has to offer.

With that answer settled somewhere inside her, unclear and clear at once, the way a philosopher's conclusions always seem to be both, she made her way back toward the place where she and Eremos had agreed to meet, carrying with her, at last, the confession she had been circling for longer than she'd let herself admit.