The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

She went looking for him again, after that — the same stretch of gray, the same patient waiting, though she told herself, each time she did it, that it was simply curiosity, the same appetite that had always sent her wandering in search of one more glimpse into one more mind. She was the one who was supposed to enter other souls' heads with her questions, not the other way around. It unsettled her, a little, to notice that his answer had entered hers instead, and had apparently decided to stay.

It might have been the accumulation of those small, infrequent meetings — the particular ache of wanting to be nearer to someone, wanting to talk to them longer than the last time allowed — that finally convinced her this feeling had a name, and that the name was love. She noticed it first as a kind of restlessness, a habit of finding herself walking, without quite deciding to, in the general direction of wherever she'd last found him. She noticed it second as a kind of dread, the particular dread of a soul who has spent her whole existence believing curiosity always fades eventually, and who now found herself hoping, against everything her own long study of other souls had taught her, that this particular curiosity might somehow be the exception.

The foolish, patient plant understood, in his own quiet way, that curiosity like hers rarely lasted; he'd watched enough souls approach him with fascination only to let it fade once the novelty wore thin. But for a soul who had never once felt anything resembling love before, giving him even a little of her attention, for however long it lasted, didn't feel like time wasted. So she confessed to him, plainly, the way she asked her riddles — no theater, no softening — and he accepted what she offered, because that has always been the whole of what accepting her meant to him: not measuring her against anyone else's claim on his time, only answering the need standing in front of him.

But here is the trouble with a soul who spends her whole existence collecting other people's answers: she had never once, in all that time, actually asked herself the question she'd spent centuries putting to everyone else. What was love, exactly? She realized, turning the thought over with the same unhurried rigor she gave every riddle she'd ever posed, that she had no answer of her own worth offering. It embarrassed her, a little, in a way very few things had ever managed to — the particular, specific embarrassment of a scholar discovering a gap in her own education precisely where she'd always assumed herself most competent. So she decided, for the first time since she'd begun handing out her small Contracts, to give real rewards — proper ones, the best she had — to any soul who could actually tell her.

She asked a soul who had once, in its life before this one, been a potato.

"Love," the potato-soul told her, with the particular unshaken confidence of someone who has never once doubted a single thing about their own former existence, "is being planted next to another potato. You grow better that way. Something about the roots." It seemed, on reflection, entirely satisfied with this answer, as though the whole of love's mystery had simply never troubled it in the first place.

She turned that over for a while, walking the gray plain alone afterward, and found that some small, uninvited part of her agreed. She wanted to be nearer to Eremos too. They hadn't yet properly seen each other, not in any complete sense — silhouettes leave so much to the imagination, and they had only ever traded descriptions of themselves rather than the plain fact of sight — but she found herself wanting to ask him, the next time she found him, whether he might let her try.

She asked a soul the narrator would call, for lack of a gentler word, an alien — a shape so far from anything she recognized that she never did work out what it might once have looked like, back in whatever corner of Something it had called home.

"Love," it told her, in a language that arrived in her mind more as a texture than as words, "is wanting so badly to touch another creature's tentacles that the wanting becomes its own kind of ache." It occurred to her, listening, that it might never have had tentacles at all, in its life before this one — but that hardly mattered, set against the plainer fact that this was the first time since arriving in the Between that she had wanted to know what skin against skin might actually feel like.

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She asked a human, expecting, perhaps, something closer to what she already believed love was supposed to resemble.

"Love," he said, with a laugh that had more grief folded into it than he seemed to notice himself, "was how many nights I spent with someone, back when I was alive. Here, in the Between, I can only imagine it." She thought, listening to him, that perhaps she needed to feel it too, in whatever way this gray world still permitted feeling, before she could trust any answer at all.

She asked a soul who claimed, without a shred of doubt in its voice, to have once been the personification of an entire season — spring, specifically, though it admitted, when pressed, that it couldn't actually remember blooming anything and might simply have enjoyed the idea of itself too much to let the claim go. "Love," it told her, with the particular grandiosity of a soul that has spent centuries deciding its own importance without much evidence to support the decision, "is the thing that makes everything grow. I would know. I invented growing." She did not find this answer especially useful. She wrote it down anyway, in whatever ledger a mind like hers keeps, because even a foolish answer, she'd learned, sometimes told her more about the soul giving it than a wise one ever could.

She asked a soul who had died, by its own quiet account, in the middle of an argument it never got the chance to finish, and who still, centuries later, carried the unfinished shape of that argument like a stone in its chest. "Love," it said, "is the thing you don't get to take back, once you've said the wrong version of it out loud." She sat with that one a long while, longer than any of the others, though she could not have told you, if you'd asked her then, exactly why.

She asked, once, a pair of souls who had arrived together and never once separated since, twin silhouettes who answered her question at exactly the same moment, in exactly the same words, without appearing to have coordinated it at all: "Love is not having to ask this question in the first place." She found that answer more unsettling than any of the others, and did not linger near them long enough to ask a follow-up.

Every answer she gathered, however foolish, however grand, however small, seemed to hold some sliver of truth worth keeping, and she had a particular gift — perhaps the truest gift of the philosopher she was — for finding the honest kernel buried inside even the most absurd reply and setting it carefully aside from the rest. She was, in this one narrow sense, a remarkably generous listener. It is a shame, this account will tell you plainly, that generosity of that kind is so rarely returned to the ones who practice it.

In the meantime, whatever she was building with Eremos continued in its own quiet, unhurried way, entirely separate from the questions she was still busy asking everyone else. He never once pressed her to explain what she was doing, wandering off across the gray for days at a time collecting other souls' definitions of a thing she'd already, in some private corner of herself, decided she felt for him. He simply waited, the way he waits for most things, and was there again whenever she came looking for him, unbothered by the strangeness of a soul who needed to survey an entire world's worth of opinion before she could trust her own.

There was an afternoon, once — if afternoon is even the right word for anything measured against the Between's own patient, sunless hours — when she found him sitting quietly near the edge of his own small territory, and instead of a riddle, she simply sat beside him and said nothing at all. It was, she would realize only much later, the first time in her entire existence she had spent time with another soul without asking it a single question. He didn't seem to need her to. He simply let the silence hold whatever it needed to hold, the same unhurried patience he offers everyone, and when she finally spoke again, it was not a riddle either — only an observation, small and unguarded, about how strange it was to sit next to someone and feel, for once, like the sitting itself was the point, rather than whatever she might learn from it. He told her, in turn, that this was very close to the only kind of company he'd ever really wanted, in all his long searching — not to be studied, not to be solved, simply to be sat beside.

She held onto that afternoon longer than she held onto almost anything else, in the years that came after. I think it matters that you know it happened, before I tell you what came next, because I don't want you to mistake what follows for a story where nothing real existed in the first place. Something real existed. That's precisely what made losing it cost as much as it did.