The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

7.1 — Centuries, All at Once

"This one," Vaelira said, taking over with the particular satisfaction of someone about to describe a version of Eremos she found genuinely, personally delightful, "is, I will admit, my favorite. Not because he's the most powerful. Because he's the most like me, and I find that endlessly entertaining."

"After Vesalia's chapter," Eremos said — and Vesalia, at the mention of her own name, went very still, though not unhappily — "after everything that happened, everything I carried afterward, there came a period, longer than I have ever properly explained to any of you, where I simply could not summon the energy to do anything at all. Not sleep, exactly, because that word implies rest, and what I experienced was not restful. It was closer to a total, centuries-deep exhaustion, the kind that settles into a soul the way sediment settles at the bottom of still water, and once it settled, it did not want to be disturbed."

"He arrived," Vaelira said, "somewhere in the middle of that stretch, and he was, by every account I collected at the time, magnificent in his own particular way. Unbothered by anything. Entirely uninterested in urgency, in schedules, in any of the small daily obligations the rest of the household still expected him to attend to. He simply existed, at whatever slow, unhurried pace suited him, for as long as it took the rest of him to recover enough to want to move again."

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on NovelFire. Report any occurrences.

"I called him the Unbothered," she said, "because I recognized, watching him, a version of my own oldest and most cherished philosophy, worn into a shape I had never once expected to see on him. I liked him immediately. I still do."

7.2 — What He Carries

"In power," Eremos said, with a faint, rueful smile, "the Unbothered is, on the surface, the least threatening of anything I carry, and in some ways the most quietly dangerous, because he is nearly impossible to provoke into using any strength at all. What he offers, instead, is an almost total resistance — attacks that would trouble the ordinary version of me simply fail to register as urgent enough to respond to, the way rain fails to register as urgent to someone who has already decided, with total and unshakeable calm, that getting wet is simply not worth minding. He is, in a very real sense, the hardest version of me to actually harm, precisely because harming him requires first convincing him that harm is worth caring about at all."

"He is also," he admitted, "the version of me the household worries about least and should, by rights, worry about slightly more than they do. A man who cannot be provoked into urgency is also a man who will not act quickly enough, in genuine danger, to protect the people relying on him. I have learned to be careful about how long I let him linger."