MOVEMENT TEN — Whose Ego Is This
"I have thought, more than once," Eremos said, in the quiet that followed, "about the actual shape of the question sitting underneath all of this. Not which name belongs to which feeling. Something deeper. Whose ego is any of this, really? Is it mine, the center of me, the part sitting here now, holding Ilyrisse's hand, that built these seven pieces so it could survive carrying everything it feels? Or is the center itself simply the smallest and most fragile piece of the arrangement — a kind of caretaker self, elected by accident to manage seven others that are, in every meaningful sense, just as much me as I am?"
"I don't have an answer," he admitted. "I have lived a very long time without one, and I expect I will go on living without one for a very long time yet. What I can tell you, honestly, is that I do not want to be any of them permanently. Not even the Constant, gentle as he is, because even total, undivided devotion, held forever without ever narrowing back down into the specific, particular love I feel for each of you individually, would eventually stop being a gift and start being its own kind of erasure."
"I want," he said, "to be the version of myself sitting here now. Imperfect. Divided. Frightened, some nights, of what I might become if the wrong feeling ever grows large enough at the wrong moment. But whole, in whatever fragile and complicated way a person built the way I was built can ever manage to be whole."
No one spoke for a long moment. It was Flora, in the end, who crossed the room and knelt beside his chair, resting her head against his knee the way she had rested it against countless surfaces across her whole long, patient existence, needing something to lean into.
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"We already knew you were divided," she said, quietly. "We just didn't know why. It doesn't change anything, you know. Loving all of you. Every piece."
"She's right," Ilyrisse said, tightening her hand around his. "You've been carrying this alone for centuries, thinking it made you less trustworthy, less lovable, less whole. It doesn't. It only means you've been protecting all of us from something you should have let us help carry a very long time ago."
"I'm not certain any of you can carry it," Eremos said, honestly. "I'm not certain it's a weight built to be shared."
"Let us decide that," Vesalia said, quiet and even, the first time all evening she had offered anything without being asked. "You don't get to make that choice alone anymore. Not after tonight."
Vaelira, curled now at the edge of the great room's largest couch, watching the whole scene with an expression that had, for once, entirely abandoned its usual lazy theater, said the thing none of the others had quite found the words for yet.
"Seven names," she said. "Seven rings of light, each a different color, each carrying a piece of you too large to hold any other way. I think, if you'll let us, we'd like to know all of them properly. Not as things to fear. As parts of you we're allowed to love, the same as we love the rest of you."
Eremos looked around the room once — at Ilyrisse's steady hand still holding his, at Flora's head resting against his knee, at Vesalia's careful, unwavering attention, at Elowen and Wren sitting close together near the hearth, at Vaelira watching him with something that had, for the length of this entire long evening, never once looked away — and felt something in him ease, very slightly, for the first time in longer than any single one of his seven divided selves could remember.
"All right," he said, quietly. "All right. Ask me anything."
[End.]