The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Torvin watched the stranger disappear. He had seen this before, more times than he'd bothered counting across the long uncounted years — an opponent, beaten badly enough, simply fading from the world the way morning mist fades once the sun has properly risen, no explanation offered, none ever expected. He had stopped questioning it a very long time ago. It was, as far as his own understanding of the world extended, simply what happened when a fight ended decisively enough. The stronger man remained. The world made room for whatever came after by quietly removing whatever had failed to keep up with it. He stood in the settling dust of the training yard — the same yard, in every detail his memory could summon, as the one his father had knelt in all those winters ago, red dirt gone the particular gold-brown of late afternoon light, though whether the light itself had changed at all across the uncounted years since the sky broke open, he had genuinely stopped being able to say. His body ached in a hundred separate places, some of them injuries fresh from this particular fight, others older aches that had simply never fully finished healing, layered one on top of the last like sediment settling at the bottom of very deep water. He was, he told himself, still the strongest. The thought arrived with less triumph than it once would have carried, in the earlier years, back when each victory had still felt like genuine proof of something rather than simply the accumulated weight of one more survived encounter added to an already impossibly long list. It arrived, instead, with something closer to exhausted relief — the particular, hollowed-out satisfaction of a man who has spent his entire existence proving the same single fact over and over, past any point where proving it again should have still felt necessary, and who has nonetheless, out of habit or promise or the simple absence of anything else his existence had ever offered him instead, kept proving it anyway. He thought of his father, kneeling in this same dirt, asking for a promise a much younger version of Torvin had made without understanding what it would eventually cost. He thought, distantly, in the last clear moment his consciousness afforded him before the accumulated damage of the fight finally caught up with the adrenaline that had been holding it at bay, that he had kept that promise. Whatever else had happened to him, whatever the light had taken from a world he no longer had the words to properly grieve, he had kept it. He was, by every honest measure his own existence had ever offered him a way to check, still the strongest thing this valley — this world, whatever remained of it, whatever strange new purpose it had apparently been given without his consent or understanding — had ever produced. He did not know how completely, or how strangely, that fact was actually true. His legs gave out beneath him a moment later, the accumulated cost of the fight finally arriving all at once now that there was no longer an opponent left standing to hold it back for. He fell, not dramatically, simply the plain unglamorous collapse of a body that had spent everything it had left to spend, and the last thought he carried down into whatever rest waited for him was not fear, and was not grief, though both of those would have been reasonable enough companions for a man in his particular circumstance to carry. It was only the same plain, exhausted certainty he had carried through every fight since the light first blinded him on a morning that no longer, strictly speaking, belonged to any calendar Something still kept. Still the strongest. He lost consciousness in the packed red dirt of a training yard built for a promise made to a man who had died winters before a sky fell and ended everything either of them had ever known, in a world that no longer existed anywhere Something could reach, kept alive for a purpose he would never once, in the whole of whatever existence remained available to him, be given the chance to understand.

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