Movement Twelve — The Narrator, on What This Cost Iris to Tell

I want to step back in, before I let this account close, and tell you something about what it must have cost Iris to say all of that out loud, even wrapped in the safe, deniable shape of a story told to a little sister who half-understood it.

She has never once, in all the years I've watched her live inside this strange, borrowed domesticity she's built for herself, spoken directly about the fear she carries. I don't think "fear" is even the right word, and I've turned over several others trying to find a closer one — dread comes closer, though dread implies an ending she can actually picture, and I don't believe she can picture this one cleanly at all. She has told you — she has told Flora, wearing the careful disguise of a fable about a nameless evil and a nameless toy — that she is capable of loving something so completely that losing it would cost her more than the world itself is worth losing to prevent that cost. She has told you that she cannot die, and that this particular immortality, in this particular circumstance, is not a mercy. It is the cruelest thing about her.

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I don't think Flora understood all of that, not the way I understand it, sitting here telling it to you plainly rather than folded inside a parable. I don't think she was meant to, not yet. Some truths are handed over deliberately half-wrapped, so that the person receiving them can carry only as much weight as they're currently able to hold, and grow into the rest of it later, on their own schedule, rather than all at once, under duress, before they're ready.

I have my own suspicions about who the toy is. I have had them for some time now, longer than I've let on in any of the accounts I've given you so far. I am not going to share them with you tonight. I think, given everything else this account has already asked you to sit with unresolved — the god who might be the man in the lake, the sister Vesalia may or may not have, the man who came back and does not know what he actually is — I think you can bear one more mystery a while longer.