The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

I want to remember the meadow instead. I think, writing all of this out, that I owe myself at least a little of that mercy before I close this entry and let whatever sleep still comes to someone like me finally take hold.

I want to remember the mornings in that gold-lit grass, the particular warmth of a sun that never fully sets, held always at the hour just past its most generous light, exactly the way Eremos built it, all those centuries ago, out of nothing but patience and a hunger for sensation he'd carried since before he had words to name the hunger with. I want to remember the specific weight of the old stone wall near his hearth, still warm from the day's fire long after the light itself has gone still, and how it feels, sitting against it, to have nowhere in particular to be for the length of an entire unhurried evening. I want to remember the smell of that place — grass, and warm stone, and something from the old nameless tree that isn't quite cedar, but close enough that I have never once needed to ask what it actually is.

I want to remember the evenings at that long stone table, half-sunk into the earth the way something settles when it's finally found a place worth staying in — Vaelira's dry, needling humor, delivered from behind eyes that always look faintly amused even when the rest of her face insists otherwise; Flora's easy unguarded warmth, the particular way she leans into whoever is nearest as though leaning were simply the natural shape of affection; Vesalia's rare, hard-won laughter, precious precisely because it comes so seldom, and precious, too, because I understand, better than most at that table, exactly how much it costs her to let it out at all. Each of them a small, specific proof that a lonely gray world can, against every reasonable expectation, still fill itself with people worth loving.

I remember, too, the particular teasing they've all taken to giving me — the daughters-in-law joke, the "Mother" they call me across a table I never once expected to be welcome at in quite this easy, familiar way. I do not know how to properly explain, even to myself, how thoroughly that teasing unsettles me, and how thoroughly, underneath the unsettling, it also warms me more than almost anything else in this strange borrowed life. I was never, in my mortal years, permitted to be one woman among equals. I was a commander, or I was alone. I do not fully know what to do with my hands, some evenings, when the household simply folds me into its ordinary chaos as though I had always belonged there.

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I want to remember what it feels like to love Eremos without the weight of everything I've just written pressing down on the loving. I have loved him since before he had a shape to be loved in — since the hillside, since the seed, since a version of myself that had not yet learned what an empire costs a person to hold. I remember teaching him to hold his first cup of water without spilling it, the particular fierce, astonished concentration on his face, as though the whole of existence had narrowed down to the simple, miraculous fact of liquid staying inside a vessel because his own two hands had willed it to. That love has never once felt like a burden to me, not in itself. It is everything wrapped around it — the visions, the dream, the shadow with no face, the shape of a Mountain I am terrified he will one day become — that has turned something that should have stayed simple into something I can barely write about without my hand beginning to shake.

But why should I be the one who sacrifices everything? I want to ask that question plainly, here, where no one can hear me ask it and think less of me for asking. I know, even as I write it, that the thought itself is not entirely true — no one in this household has ever asked me to carry this weight alone, and I do not think any of them would let me, if I finally found the courage to set even a portion of it down in front of them. But every memory of the future I carry arrives as a fresh, private terror, and terror, I have found, does not much care whether the logic underneath it holds up to scrutiny. It simply arrives, and asks to be carried, and I have spent centuries now answering that particular demand without once questioning whether I was obligated to.

I try, most days, to keep my emotions from overtaking my judgment. I want to write that plainly too, because I think it matters, set against everything else in this entry — I am careful, even now, even as the Empress of Eternity, not to let myself feel too much joy, or too much fear, in case either one loosens my grip on myself enough to make me do something I would later regret. I have watched what unchecked feeling does to souls far stronger than I am. I have no wish to become a lesson someone else eventually has to write about, the way I am writing about everyone else's grief tonight.

But why is it so difficult, despite every careful precaution I've built for myself, to stop my heart from leaping every single time I am near him? It is a sensation that has never once changed, in all the centuries since I first let myself feel it — I cannot help feeling happy, standing inside what I have learned, slowly and against my own better judgment, to call home. I cannot help wanting, simply, to let myself be carried along by it, consequences and visions and shadows aside, if only for the length of a single ordinary evening.