The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Eremos felt him before he saw him — not danger exactly, not yet, but a pressure at the edge of his awareness that had no business being there, the particular wrongness of attention aimed at you by someone who had not earned the right to give it.

He stopped walking. He had learned, across a very long life, to trust that particular wrongness the moment it arrived, the way you trust a change in wind before you've consciously registered what shifted.

The man came into view a few dozen paces off, cresting a low rise in the gray that Eremos hadn't even registered as a rise until someone else's shape appeared on top of it. Tall, unhurried, dressed in the layered dark finery of a world Eremos didn't recognize — rich fabric, the kind that had clearly been expensive even before someone died in it, and two rings, one on each hand, catching a light that had no obvious source to catch it from. His face wore an expression Eremos had seen before, on exactly one kind of person, across exactly one kind of encounter: the specific, unhurried confidence of someone who has never once, in his own accounting of his own life, lost.

"You're a difficult thing to find a proper reason for," the man said, without any greeting attached to it, the way you might address a puzzle rather than a person. "I've been walking toward you for the better part of an afternoon, and I still can't say I understand why my own instincts insisted you were worth the walk. You don't carry yourself like something dangerous."

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"I'm not looking for a fight," Eremos said, which was true, and which he offered mostly out of the old, ingrained habit of trying the gentlest door first, on the chance that this, too, turned out to be a misunderstanding rather than a threat. "I'm looking for someone. If you'll excuse me—"

"I didn't ask what you were looking for." The man's tone didn't sharpen, exactly. It simply settled, the way a held breath settles into something you understand is not going to be released without a cost attached. "I asked myself, this morning, to show me the strongest thing within reach. My own gift has never once been wrong about a want that plainly stated. And it walked me here. To you." A faint, considering tilt of his head, the two rings on his hands catching that same sourceless light. "So either my gift has finally failed me for the first time in longer than I care to remember, or you are considerably more than you appear to be standing here in front of me looking, forgive me, like nothing at all."

Eremos felt something in his chest go carefully, deliberately still — the particular stillness he'd spent an age of the universe learning, root-bound and silent, long before he'd ever had a voice to raise in his own defense. "I don't know you," he said. "I don't know what you're looking for, or why whatever brought you here decided I was worth the trip. I'd like it to be a misunderstanding. I'd like to keep walking."

"I don't believe in misunderstandings," the man said. "Only in things I haven't yet finished testing."

He moved before Eremos had finished deciding whether the sentence itself counted as a warning.