The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

There were nights, in those happy years, when the little one woke up alone, for no apparent reason, his body tense before his mind finished understanding why.

He would look up at the sky. And there it was, always at the same distant edge of the world, always far enough not to make out shapes but close enough to hear the sound: a deep, mechanical, incessant hum, the kind of noise a giant insect would make if a giant insect could carry the weight of an entire war on its back. Sometimes it came with a light — not warm like the stars, but cold, bluish, the color of an ancient metal — that moved in a straight line across the sky with a determination no natural phenomenon the little one had ever seen possessed.

His mother, on those nights, woke too, though never for the same reason he did. She woke because he woke, because even asleep some part of her stayed alert to changes in her son's breathing. She would come closer, press her muzzle against his side, and stay there, still, without understanding whatever was happening in the sky, understanding only that her son was afraid, and that fear deserved company even if it couldn't be resolved.

The little one never told her — because he had no way to, and because even if he'd had a way, he wouldn't have known what words to use — that every time he saw that cold light crossing the sky, he felt, somewhere beneath his chest, a certainty with no clear origin: that hum was not a phenomenon of the sky like rain or thunder. It was a pursuit. And somewhere in Something, far beyond what his child's eyes could reach, someone was running from it.

He did not yet know that someone was his father.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

He did not yet know that the reason he had never met his father, the reason his mother had never had a mate at her side to help her hunt or defend them, was not that his father had abandoned them out of indifference. It was that staying near them — staying long enough for Something to pinpoint precisely where he was — would have been, for his father, signing the death sentence of everything he loved.

There was a word for what pursued his father, though the little one wouldn't learn it until much later, until it was already too late for that word to do him any good. Correction. Something, in its vast and indifferent architecture, had produced an anomaly — a pig capable of creating entire worlds with the same ease with which other beings breathed, a force so disproportionate to everything around it that its mere existence threatened the balance of things even Something itself did not fully understand — and had responded, as it always responded to what it could not cleanly classify, by sending something designed exclusively to contain it. An insect knight, mounted on another pig, armed with a trident forged from the same indifferent substance that had forged his father. A counterweight. A tool.

The Fly did not sleep. The Fly did not tire, not in the way a mortal body tires. The Fly pursued his father across the whole of Something, from planet to planet, from sky to sky, with the mechanical patience of something that didn't need to win quickly — it only needed to never stop trying.

And his father, carrying that weight, had made the only decision a being that immense could make without condemning the only family that mattered to him: disappear. Keep moving. Never stay long enough in any one place for the pursuit to find, alongside him, the donkey and the son he had left behind.

The little one knew none of this, on those nights, watching the sky with his body tense and his mother pressed against his side. He only knew that something, somewhere, hurt. And that pain, without his being able to explain it, felt like a form of love he had never had the chance to receive in person.