The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

9.1 — Where They Began

"Which brings us," Eremos said, quietly, "to tonight."

The room went still again, in a different way than it had gone still in the western hall — not the cold, pressing stillness of something dangerous standing among them, but the ordinary, attentive stillness of people finally ready to understand something they had, until an hour ago, only been frightened by.

"I told you, at the beginning of this conversation, that I built these pieces of myself so that the rest of me could go on functioning without being crushed under the weight of feelings too large and too permanent to hold all at once. What I did not yet explain is what happens to a mind that has spent centuries doing exactly that — dividing itself, again and again, into ever more separate pieces, each one carrying a single overwhelming feeling so the center could stay whole."

"Something in me, somewhere along the way, began to notice the pattern. Not consciously, not in any way I could have described to you before tonight, but somewhere underneath the ordinary version of myself that sits here talking to you now. And that noticing, left long enough without anyone to explain it to, curdled, slowly, into something none of the others quite are: a piece of me built entirely around the accumulated weight of every other piece, and what all of them, together, seem to prove about the shape of my own self-importance."

"The others carry a single feeling," he said. "This one carries the sum of all of them — every permanent love, every permanent fury, every permanent desire and grief and judgment I have ever divided off from myself so the rest of me could survive holding it — and reads that entire accumulated weight as evidence. Evidence that everything around me, everyone around me, this whole household, this whole castle, exists, in some fundamental sense, because of me, and is owed, in return, to me."

"We have never given him a proper name," Vaelira said, quietly, "because we have never wanted to give him the dignity of one. Tonight, I think, we have to."

9.2 — The Naming

They debated it for longer than any of the others, longer even than the Unquenched, because this one, everyone in the room understood without needing to say it aloud, was the one that actually frightened them.

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"Something that doesn't glorify it," Ilyrisse said. "I don't want a grand name for this. I don't want it to sound like a title he'd want to be called by."

"Something honest, then," Vesalia offered, the first thing she'd volunteered all evening. "Not cruel. Just honest."

It was Elowen, in the end — Elowen, who had once assumed the household would run on the same rigid hierarchies her old court had, and had been gently corrected exactly once — who found it.

"The Absolute I," she said, quietly, none of her usual theater in it at all. "Because that's what it is, isn't it. Not a king. Not a god. Just a self that's forgotten there's supposed to be a we."

No one argued with her. The name settled into the room the way true names always seem to settle, without ceremony, simply arriving and staying because nothing else had ever fit as well.

9.3 — What He Carries

"In power," Eremos said, and there was real fear in his voice now, the first genuine fear any of them had heard from him all evening, "the Absolute I is, without question, the most dangerous thing I carry, more dangerous even than the God of Destruction, because destruction, at least, knows what it wants to end. This one does not want to end anything. It wants to claim — everything, all of it, without limit, because it has convinced itself, through the sheer accumulated weight of every other permanent feeling I carry, that everything already, by rights, belongs to it."

"He does not fight the way the others fight," he continued. "He simply asserts, and reality, for as long as he holds it, seems to bend slightly to accommodate the assertion — the way Something itself once bent, long ago, around a man who believed himself chosen and was never quite told otherwise. I do not fully understand the limits of what he could do, if he were ever allowed to remain for long enough. I have never let him remain for long enough to find out, and I intend, for as long as I have any say in the matter, never to."

"The ring that marks him," he said, quieter still, "is gold — the same warm gold every one of you has seen in this castle's ordinary evening light, except that his gold does not warm anything it touches. It simply claims it, the way a king's banner claims a conquered city, indifferent to whether the city ever wanted to belong to him at all."