The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

You've heard me talk about mirrors before, haven't you? If you've been paying attention — and I do hope you have, because I find very little more tiresome than repeating myself to an audience that wasn't listening the first time, the specific, familiar boredom of a joke that only works if the room remembers the setup — you'll have noticed that something peculiar always seems to happen around them. A shape catches in one, uninvited, gone again before anyone can be certain they actually saw it. Glass breaks for no reason a sensible person could point to, no draft, no tremor, no careless elbow anywhere in the vicinity, simply a sound and then a floor full of pieces that refuse, when you kneel down to examine them properly, to reassemble into anything resembling the shape they came from.

Let me remind you of a few, since I know full well how easy it is to let details like this slide past you when there are so many other things in this story competing for your attention — a household this size generates a great deal of competing attention, and I don't blame anyone for losing the thread of a stray, unsettling detail buried three chapters back when there's a heartthread trembling somewhere else on the page and somebody's daughter to grieve properly. There was the mirror Iris stood before, the one that shattered the instant she and Flora finished a certain conversation about time, and toys, and things too large to be loved safely — you'll remember that one, I'm sure, if you were paying proper attention, the way a small, careful silence settled over that entire scene afterward, the way nobody in the room quite met anyone else's eyes for a beat longer than the moment strictly required. There was the glass at the edge of that terrible burning boundary, the one that held a lantern's light steady through rain that shouldn't have existed at all in a Fragment built without weather in mind, a small, stubborn defiance of physics that everyone present agreed, afterward, not to examine too closely. Small moments, easy to miss individually, the sort of thing you file under "strange" and move on from because moving on is so very much easier than sitting with the alternative. Add enough of them together, though — and I have been adding, patiently, quietly, for longer than anyone in that household has known to watch me doing it — even someone as determinedly unbothered as I generally prefer to be starts noticing a pattern.

We call the place behind all of that the Mirror World, and I'm going to walk you through it properly now, because I think it's finally earned a proper explanation rather than another stray, unsettling mention tossed off between something funnier and something warmer.

Here's the shape of the logic, and see if you can follow it, because I promise you it gets more complicated than it looks at first glance, and I have very little patience left tonight for anyone who wants the simple version when the true one is sitting right here, available, if you're willing to sit with me long enough to hear it properly. Every memory that comes back to a soul completing a Mission has to come from somewhere. It doesn't simply manufacture itself out of nothing, the way you might assume, if you'd never bothered to ask the question properly — and most souls never do bother, because most souls are simply grateful for the memory's arrival and never once pause to wonder about its point of origin, the way a person drinking gratefully from a well rarely stops to ask which mountain the water first fell on as rain. You might already be guessing where I'm going with this. You might not be. It's considerably more complicated than either guess, so don't feel too clever either way just yet — I've watched cleverer minds than yours arrive at half an answer and mistake it, with real and genuine confidence, for the whole of one.

Here's something you should have already noticed, if you've truly been paying attention, and I mean truly, not the polite, half-distracted attention most readers bring to the parts of a story that don't yet involve anyone they've fallen in love with: my title is entirely useless against that world. I am the Witch of Infinite Time. I hold dominion, in every practical sense that matters anywhere else in the Between or in Something, over the whole slippery architecture of temporal flow — I have made rivers of it run backward for my own amusement, I have let a single hour stretch long enough to raise a child in, I have, on one memorable and thoroughly regrettable occasion, made an entire war finish itself three separate times before I was satisfied with how the ending sat. Time simply does not function inside the Mirror World. My power runs thin there, the way a river runs thin crossing ground it was never built to cross, thinning and thinning until what reaches the far bank is barely worth calling a current at all.

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Time flows, out in the ordinary world, the world you and most of the people reading this currently occupy, moving the sensible things it's supposed to move — grief, growth, the slow softening of a wound that was once too raw to touch. But if you happen to be a mountain — and I do mean that quite literally, not as some cute little metaphor I'm dressing up for your benefit, though I'll grant you it does dress up rather nicely as one — it hardly matters how strong the current gets. The very worst a river can manage against a mountain is wearing it down, slowly, over a span of time so long it stops being meaningful to measure in any unit a mortal mind was ever built to hold. It is never, under any circumstance, going to move you. That's one of my little secrets for staying so effortlessly, infuriatingly young, if you must know — not vanity, not some careful ritual performed at dawn, simply the plain, structural fact of having decided, somewhere very far back, to be the kind of thing time wears at rather than the kind of thing time carries along with it. If there's a girl out there curious about the method, she's welcome to ask me directly, and I'll happily tell her how she might manage the same trick herself, though I should warn her in advance that it requires being considerably harder to move than most people are built to be, and most people, quite reasonably, aren't interested in paying that particular price.

All jokes aside — and yes, I do occasionally set them aside, when the occasion actually calls for it, whatever certain members of my own household might claim to the contrary — you, the one currently reading this, are also something the current can carry. You can know what happens in the world you're reading from. Things like brainrot. Things like weapons. Things like buses. We have our own versions of all of that out here in the Between, nothing that resembles yours very closely on the surface — you would not recognize a single one of our equivalents if I set them directly in front of you and asked you to name them — but serving more or less the identical function underneath the resemblance, the same shapes wearing entirely different faces, the way grief wears one face in a palace and a wholly different one in a gutter and remains, underneath both, precisely the same animal. Yes — even the fourth wall itself can't stop me. I've broken it plenty of times already, and I intend to go on doing it whenever the mood strikes me, because I have never once in my very long existence found a rule I respected simply for being a rule, and I don't intend to start respecting this one now, at this late and thoroughly inconvenient hour of my own story. But the Mirror World? That one, even I can't touch.

My power doesn't reach there. And that, on its own, would simply be an interesting little fact about the architecture of our shared cosmology, the sort of thing you file away and bring out at a dinner party to watch people's faces do something complicated. Except it isn't only that anymore. It's starting to affect the real world too — small slippages at first, the sort of thing you could explain away individually if you were determined enough to keep explaining, and then, gradually, less small. I don't know the cause yet, not with any certainty I'd be willing to stake my own name on, and I want that understood plainly, because I know how badly certain corners of this household would love it if I simply announced an answer and let everyone relax around it. I'm not going to do that tonight. My best guess — and I want you to understand that a guess is genuinely all it is, tonight, offered honestly rather than dressed up as something sturdier than it is — is that it has something to do with the exceptions currently walking around loose in existence. I know a little about a few of them. There are others I still need to properly get to the bottom of, threads I've only just begun pulling, the far ends of which I haven't yet located. And I don't think, if I'm honest with you the way I try very hard to be honest with everyone I actually respect — a considerably shorter list than you might imagine, though you, dear reader, have quietly earned a place on it, whether either of us fully meant for that to happen — that there's enough time left to neutralize every single one of them before something gives.