The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

There is a piece of this that Caedmon never saw, because his gift, for all its reach, was never built to show him someone else's heart from the inside, only the favorable roads a person's own wanting could be walked down. It belongs here anyway, because a story about a door left closed is not complete without some account of what stood, unseen, on the other side of it.

The vast, formless pressure in Caedmon's fractured future was not formless to itself. It had a name, though almost nothing in existence had ever been positioned to learn it, and the name was Iris — a contradiction wearing the smallest, gentlest lie she had ever told, walking through a version of Something that had not yet quite arrived, watching a fold of a future the rest of existence would not reach for a very long time yet.

She could see across eons the way other souls glance across a room; this account has already said as much, in an earlier telling, and it bears repeating here because it is the only honest explanation for how she came to witness a moment that had not, from Caedmon's side of things, happened at all. She was not bound by the order events insisted on for everyone else. A future thread and a present moment were, to her, simply two rooms in the same house, and she walked between them the way anyone walks between rooms they already own.

It should be understood, watching her do this, that she did not go looking for that particular fold of time on purpose, any more than she had gone looking for the colorless hill the first time curiosity carried her there. She had simply been doing what she always did, in the vast unhurried stretches between the rare occasions anything managed to hold her attention past its natural length — drifting, the way water drifts, through every direction time could be measured, glancing at fragments of what had been and what would be with the same detached, encyclopedic patience she brought to everything. She had catalogued a thousand futures that never mattered to her at all before she came, almost by accident, upon the one that would.

She had seen, in that particular fold, a version of Eremos she did not recognize as the one she had already, by then, chosen to be seen by — no longer the quiet, patient, wordless thing she had first watched from a great and idle distance, but something else entirely, something the fractured thread of that future had made of him under pressures this account is not yet ready to name. She had watched him plant himself between Ilyrisse and a shape she understood, immediately and with a clarity nothing else in existence could have offered her, was herself — some future iteration of her own vast and terrible power, arrived at by a road she had not yet walked and did not, in the present she still occupied, fully intend to.

It should not have been possible for anything to make her feel what she felt, watching that. She had catalogued the whole of existence, past and present and future both, with the same idle and unhurried attention most souls reserve for weather. She had watched endings that had not yet arrived and would not arrive for spans of time no mortal unit could meaningfully express, and none of it, not once, had ever produced in her anything close to what settled into her chest watching a man she had barely begun to let herself want stand utterly, completely unafraid in front of a version of her own power that should, by every law either of them understood, have unmade him instantly.

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He did not move. Whatever the shape he had become in that fractured future — a shape this account will describe properly before it is finished, a shape that had cost him something Caedmon's own visions never let him see clearly enough to understand — he stood in front of that vast pressing dark the same way he had once stood, wordless and rootbound, on a colorless hill centuries of her own patient watching ago, turning toward the only thing worth turning toward because turning toward things was the one language he had ever truly known.

It was this, more than the idle curiosity that had first drawn her back to a quiet hill again and again longer than any honest accounting of interest should have lasted, that finally moved her to do something she had never once done in the whole of her existence.

She went looking for him early.

Not in that fractured future, where whatever confrontation waited between them had not yet, from her own present vantage, fully resolved into anything she could act on. In the present she still occupied — in the same unremarkable fold of a young and barely-shaped Between where a voiceless plant-soul sat on a hill waiting for nothing in particular, because waiting was the only verb his existence had yet learned. She had already told this account, in an earlier telling, of the idle glance that first found him there, and of the choice she eventually made to let herself be seen. What that earlier telling did not say, because it was not yet time to say it, was why curiosity had finally refused, that particular time, to resolve itself back into simple knowledge and move on the way it always had before.

It was because she had already, in some sense too strange for even her to fully hold steady, watched him love her once — in a future she had not yet lived toward, in a shape neither of them currently wore, standing in front of a danger that was, in the plainest and least comfortable accounting available, herself.

Why the two of them came to stand against each other at all, in that fractured thread where a man wearing Eremos's face and carrying none of his ordinary reason stood between Iris and a woman he called mother — this account is not yet prepared to say. Why a version of Eremos still, by every law either world had ever written, belonging to the Between would find himself standing inside Something at all, in defiance of every ordinary architecture that governs where a soul of his kind is permitted to exist — this, too, waits for a later telling, because some doors are worth leaving closed a while longer, the same way Caedmon left his.

What can be said, here, plainly, is only this: Iris found him early because a version of him, somewhere down a road none of them had walked yet, had already found a way to make her afraid of losing something for the first time in the whole of her existence. And fear, even in a being this vast, this far outside every ledger existence keeps, turns out to move a person the same way it moves everyone else.

It moves them toward the thing they're afraid of losing, faster than caution would otherwise allow.