The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

The visions of the future have changed. And I find myself, writing this, a little more at ease than I have been in longer than I care to admit counting.

I want to set down plainly what I mean by that, because I think if I do not write it carefully now, in this quiet hour, I will lose the courage to write it at all come morning. For a long while — longer than any single soul in this household besides myself and Vaelira understands — I have carried a particular dark shape of what was still to come. Avoiding it, living instead toward whatever gentler future might still be possible, has become the only thing left that gives me the strength to remain standing, rather than simply lying down somewhere quiet and letting an eternity of sleep take whatever remains of me.

I was tired. I want that written plainly, in my own hand, where I cannot later pretend I never admitted it. Tired of remembering a future I had not yet lived. Tired of spending every ordinary, golden afternoon in that meadow doing the quiet, exhausting arithmetic of how to prevent it — watching Eremos laugh at something Flora said, watching his hand find Vesalia's shoulder in that easy, unthinking way of his, and beneath the watching, always, the same cold undercurrent: not yet, not yet, please let this be one of the afternoons where the shadow stays where I left it. I could not escape any of it, however hard I tried, because I had Eremos in front of me — not yet the monster my visions kept insisting he would become, not yet, but following the same path toward it, at the same unhurried, inevitable pace, and I did not know, do not know even now, how to turn him from it without unmaking the very tenderness that makes him worth protecting in the first place.

I wanted to weep, writing that sentence. The armor I have built for myself, across centuries thick enough that I have long since stopped remembering what I looked like before I started building it, does not permit me easy tears, even now, even alone, even here in the private dark of my own chamber where no one else's eyes could witness the weeping if I allowed it. I remember, faintly, what weeping used to feel like — a much younger version of myself, still mortal, still permitted the ordinary luxury of a body that simply did what grief asked of it without first requesting the sovereign's permission. I do not have that luxury any longer. What I have instead is this: a hand steady enough to hold a pen, and a page patient enough to receive whatever the steadiness is hiding.

Stolen story; please report.

I have Vaelira, who carries the same vision I carry, who has seen the same dark shape I have seen. And yet neither of us has ever managed to say to the other, plainly, in so many words, exactly what we saw. We circle it instead. We speak around the edges of it, the way two people speak around a grief too large to name directly, each of us hoping, I think, that the other will finally be the one brave enough to say it first. I have caught her, more than once, watching Eremos across the dinner table with an expression I recognize far too well, because I have worn it myself more nights than I can count — the particular, careful blankness of someone doing arithmetic behind her eyes and hoping no one notices the sum she's arriving at.

I am afraid that what I call home will break, slowly, piece by piece, the way most things break — not all at once, in some single dramatic collapse, but quietly, in a hundred small failures to speak plainly when speaking plainly was the only thing that could have saved it. And worse than that fear, worse than almost anything else I carry, is the fear that Eremos will have no one beside him when it finally happens, the way I saw it happen, in whatever fold of the future my own sight was cruel enough to show me. I have seen enough endings, across my long existence, to know that the worst ones are never the loud ones. The worst ones are the quiet ones — the ones that arrive because everyone in the room already half-knew, and none of them said so out loud in time.