Movement Seven — The Watcher Who Never Came

I want to tell you something else here, briefly, before we move on — something this account has touched only glancingly before, and which I think belongs beside everything else you've just heard.

There is a version of this world — this account will not pretend to fully understand the mechanics of how such a version can exist alongside the one you and I are currently walking through together, only that it does, somewhere, in whatever fold of possibility the Between's own strange architecture permits to persist unresolved — in which Iris never appeared at all. In that other telling, Ilyrisse and Vaelira did not die early. The particular chain of grief and loss that eventually put a seed on a colorless hill, waiting to be found, simply never assembled itself the same way. And because it never assembled itself, Iris never saw the vision that sent her looking for that seed centuries before she otherwise would have — never saw the future she calls, in her own private shorthand, the Mountain: a version of Eremos grown vast and corrupted by his own unchecked power, standing between her and Ilyrisse, in some confrontation this account has never been given permission to describe in full.

In that other telling, Iris remains only a rumor. A held breath at the edge of the world, spoken of by the very oldest souls in hushed, half-doubting tones, never confirmed, never met, never woven into anyone's ordinary domestic life the way she has been woven into this one. I think about that other telling more than I let on, narrating this account to you. I think about how close this particular household — this exact table, this exact teasing, this exact sister who calls Flora little sister and means it completely — came to simply never existing at all, in some other fold of the same vast, branching possibility.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

I do not know what that means for the story I am telling you now. I do not know whether the two tellings are aware of each other, whether one casts any shadow at all across the other, or whether they simply run in parallel, forever separate, each one entirely convinced of its own singularity. I only know that Iris herself carries some awareness of it — some faint, unexplainable certainty that she very nearly wasn't here at all, and that the household she has built her whole fragile, borrowed happiness around exists only because a vision found her in time to prevent whatever the alternative would have cost. I think that awareness is part of why she carries fear as constantly as she does. Not fear of losing what she has now, exactly. Fear of the version of events where she never had it to lose in the first place.