The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Eremos called her Iris.

He did not know, when he chose the name -- with the same unthinking, affectionate simplicity he had used centuries earlier for another soul entirely, back on a stone hill under a brightening horizon -- that he was repeating himself. What he knew, or believed he knew, was only what she had told him: that she had once been a flower, in whatever life had come before this one, the way he himself had once been a plant-soul long before he learned to hold a human shape. It was, on its surface, the simplest possible thing two strangers might discover they had in common. It was also, in its entirety, a lie.

She was not a flower. She had never been a flower, had never been any single living thing that a mortal world could have grown and named and pressed between the pages of a book. What she was defied the very categories "flower" and "not-flower" belonged to in the first place -- she was not a species, not a soul with a biography, not a shape that Something had ever produced through the ordinary business of growing things and letting them die. She was, if the truth must be stated in the coldest terms available, a contradiction: the specific, impossible place where Something and Nothing failed to cancel each other out, failed even to notice each other's presence in the space she occupied, failed at the one operation that every other point in existence performs constantly and without effort -- the simple act of being registered as real by the two systems that register everything.

She had told him she was a flower because it was the smallest, gentlest lie she had ever constructed, and because, in the exact moment she told it, she had wanted, more than she had wanted almost anything else in the entire unmeasured span of her existence, to be something he could hold in his hands without either of them being destroyed by the honest answer.

He had believed her instantly, without suspicion, because there was no reason in his experience of the world to doubt it -- plant-souls were not common, but they were not myths either, and he himself was living proof that a life could begin exactly that way, quiet and rooted and voiceless before it ever learned to become anything else. He had looked at her, heard the word flower leave whatever passed for her mouth in that moment, and reached, without hesitation, for the softest name he knew, the same reflex of tenderness that had once produced Flora's name on a different hill in a different age. He said it the way he had always named the things he loved: not with ceremony, but with instinct.

She had not corrected him. She never corrected him, about this or about anything else that mattered less than it seemed to. If pressed -- though no one had ever pressed her, because almost no one in existence was capable of finding her long enough to ask -- she might have said that being mistaken for something small, something gentle, something as unthreatening and as explicably real as a flower, was the single greatest kindness anyone had ever unknowingly done her. It let her be loved the way an ordinary thing is loved. It let her, for the first time in a span of time that made mortal history look like a single held breath, be small on purpose.

She had a face that made rooms go quiet, in the rare instances she allowed a room to see it at all -- the kind of beauty that did not announce itself so much as simply exist, complete and unhurried, mass exactly where mass belonged, softness exactly where softness belonged, a symmetry so total it read less like an achievement and more like a fact of nature, the way a particularly perfect shoreline reads as fact rather than art. It was the sort of face that, had she wanted to be looked at, would have made looking away impossible. She rarely wanted to be looked at. This, too, was a kind of power, though not the kind anyone would have listed first among her many unlisted qualifications.

To Eremos, she was simply another soul who had found her way, eventually, into the strange and sprawling family he had built around himself without ever fully meaning to build it. He did not correct himself when he thought of her that way, because there was, from his side of things, nothing to correct. She had told him a small, kind lie, once, long ago, and he had built a name around it, and neither of those two facts had ever once needed revisiting, as far as he understood the world.

Here is the plain truth of what she was, stated as simply as such a truth can be stated, though simplicity does very little to make it easier to hold: if the question is who was the strongest being to ever exist in the deepest past this world's memory reaches back to, the answer is her. If the question is who is the strongest being existing right now, in this exact unfolding moment, across every soul and every syndicate and every legend whispered in the Between's oldest corners, the answer is her. If the question is who will be the strongest being in whatever future eventually arrives, the answer, again, without qualification or competition, is her. If the world ends -- if Something and Nothing ever tire of the accumulated weight of exception and simply let the whole structure go, the way they have quietly reserved the right to do since before the concept of reservation existed at all -- and a new cycle begins from nothing, humming forward through whatever new laws that new cycle chooses to write for itself, the question of who stands at the top of that new order too has, disturbingly, the exact same answer.

No one is above her. Not in the sense that she has simply never lost a contest of strength, though that much is also true. Above her, in the sense that matters, in the sense that would frighten any soul capable of understanding it fully: no existence, past, present, or future, real or theoretical, has ever posed her a threat worth the name.

She is not perceived by Something. She is not perceived by Nothing. This is not a matter of her hiding, exactly, though the effect reads the same from outside -- it is closer to the truth to say that she exists at a register neither system has the capacity to register at all, a frequency below or beyond or simply orthogonal to whatever apparatus Something and Nothing use to notice the countless deviations, exceptions, and anomalies that make up the rest of existence. The man in Part I had to fight for his invisibility to correction, had to accumulate deviation after deviation until the pattern finally, grudgingly, adjusted around him. She has never had to fight for anything. She was simply never in the ledger to begin with. There is no column wide enough to hold her, and so no column was ever drawn.

She can see both systems entirely, whenever she chooses to look. She can touch them -- reach into the fabric of Something, the fabric of Nothing, and rearrange either one according to whatever whim occurred to her, with no more resistance than a hand meets stirring water. She could destroy the present equilibrium of the entire Between, of all Something, of the boundary itself that gives Nothing its shape, and construct an entirely new balance from the wreckage, according to whatever design she preferred, and there is not a single force in existence -- past, present, future, or reset -- capable of stopping her, or even of noticing the act was happening until it was already finished.

She does not do this. Not out of inability, and not, in truth, out of any grand philosophical restraint she has ever bothered to articulate even to herself. She does not do this because her honey is here. Because Eremos exists inside the equilibrium she could unmake in an instant, and the one thing she has ever wanted enough to organize the whole vast, terrifying scope of her power around is the simple, unremarkable fact of his continued existence within a world exactly as it currently is.

This is, though she has never once framed it to herself in these terms, the largest act of love that has ever occurred in the history of either Something or Nothing. A being capable of ending everything, holding everything perfectly still, indefinitely, for the sake of one soul who does not even know what she is.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

She could see across eons the way ordinary souls glance across a room. Past, present, future -- the distinctions that governed everyone else's experience of time meant, for her, roughly what the distinction between rooms in the same house means to someone who owns the house: differences of location, not differences of accessibility. She had watched the beginning of things she suspected even Something and Nothing themselves did not fully remember choosing. She had watched, with the same idle, unhurried attention most souls reserve for weather, endings that had not yet arrived and would not arrive for spans of time no mortal unit of measurement could meaningfully express.

It should have been impossible for anything to surprise her.

She found him by accident -- if accident is even the correct word for the one crack that has ever appeared, in the entire unmeasured span of her existence, in the otherwise total invisibility she maintains from everything around her. She was looking, the way she often looked, across some ordinary stretch of eons, at nothing in particular, the specific unfocused attention of a being for whom watching costs nothing and reveals everything eventually regardless of whether she is looking for it. And there, in some unremarkable fold of a Between still young enough to have barely finished shaping its own geography, she saw him.

A voiceless, rootbound plant-soul, alone on a hill, waiting for nothing in particular because waiting was the only verb his existence had yet learned.

She did not know, in that first idle glance, what she was looking at. She would come to know, much later, exactly what he would become -- the shape his existence would eventually take, the name he would eventually be given by the very woman who had once watched over him with an almost unbearable love, the constellation of souls he would eventually gather around himself, herself included, though she did not yet know that either. But in that first moment, looking across eons at a mute, immobile silhouette on a colorless hill, she felt something she had never once, in the entire history of her observing everything that has ever existed or will exist, been made to feel before.

Curiosity that did not resolve immediately into knowledge.

She watched him longer than she meant to. She told herself, in whatever internal language a being like her uses to tell herself things, that this was simply idle interest, the same idle interest she extended to countless other unremarkable fragments of existence scattered across countless other unremarkable moments. But she kept returning to that particular fold of time, that particular hill, that particular silhouette, long after any honest accounting of idle interest should have exhausted itself.

And then -- this was the part that still, centuries later, made something in her go quiet in a way nothing else in all of existence had ever managed to -- he looked back.

Not at her power. Not at what she was, because he had no way of perceiving what she was, no more than Something or Nothing themselves could perceive it. He looked at her the way he looked at everything in that early, wordless stretch of his existence: with the patient, unguarded attention of something that had spent an age of the universe learning to notice, because noticing was the only action available to a being that could not yet move. He did not know he was looking at the strongest thing to have ever existed, in any direction time could be measured. He simply saw a presence, and turned toward it the way a plant turns toward light, because turning toward things was the only language he had.

She had imagined, across the eons she had spent watching countless futures unfold and dissolve and reform into other futures, a great many things about how she might eventually encounter whatever partner destiny -- if destiny were even a concept that applied to something like her -- might eventually place beside her. She had not imagined this. She had not imagined that the man who would someday become her husband would first look at her the way one looks at any other soul: without fear, without recognition, without the faintest awareness that he was in the presence of something the entire architecture of existence itself had no capacity to measure.

The first time she let herself be found -- and it was, whatever the shape of the accident that first drew her eye, entirely her own choice in the end, because nothing sees her that does not first receive her permission to do so -- it was not on the hill. That earlier glimpse had cost her nothing and asked nothing of her; she had simply watched, the way she watched everything, from a vantage no soul in any timeline had ever shared with her. What came later, once curiosity had done what curiosity had never once managed to do before and refused to resolve itself into simple knowledge and move on, was a choice.

She stepped into the same fold of time she had been returning to for longer than she cared to admit, and let herself be seen.

He was further along by then -- no longer voiceless, no longer rootbound, walking now on legs that still moved with the deliberate, faintly unpracticed grace of something that had spent an age of the universe learning stillness before it ever learned motion. She appeared to him without ceremony, in a stretch of the Between so unremarkable it barely qualified as anywhere at all -- flat gray stone under a flat gray sky, the kind of nowhere that made up most of the world's vast, unpopulated distances. He did not startle. He simply turned toward her the way he turned toward everything, patient and attentive, and said nothing for a long moment, only looked, the way she remembered him looking at the horizon on that hill centuries of her own watching ago.

"You're new," he said finally, which was, she would think later, an almost unbearably ordinary thing to say to the single most powerful being to have ever existed across the whole of time.

"I suppose I am," she said, and found, with a small, private astonishment that she did not let show on her face, that she had never once had to consider before what her own voice should sound like when speaking to someone who might actually be listening.

He asked her nothing about power, nothing about what she was, because it had not once occurred to him that there was anything to ask. He asked her, instead, the way he had once asked Flora, the way he asked every soul he found alone in the Between's endless gray, what she remembered. It was such a small question. It undid something in her that centuries of watching civilizations rise and dissolve across every fold of Something had never once come close to touching.

She told him she had been a flower.

She did not plan the lie before it left her; it arrived the way true instinct arrives, faster than deliberation, already finished by the time she noticed it forming. It was, she understood even as she said it, the smallest and gentlest shape she could possibly give herself -- something rooted, something that grew and was tended and asked nothing more complicated of the world than sunlight and rain. Something a man who had once been a plant himself would recognize instantly, without suspicion, without the need for her to explain the parts of herself that had no explanation any mortal or immortal language had ever been built to hold.

He believed her without hesitation. He reached, in that same unthinking, tender reflex that had once produced another name on another hill, and gave her one now -- soft, simple, exactly the kind of name a person gives something they intend to be gentle with for as long as it lets them.

She let him. She has gone on letting him, every day since, across a span of shared existence long enough that even she, who watches centuries the way other souls watch weather, has stopped being able to say precisely how long it has been. It is, she thinks sometimes, in the rare private moments she allows herself to think about it at all, the only lie she has ever told that she has never once regretted -- because the alternative, the truth, was never a gift either of them could have survived exchanging on a gray stone under a gray sky, on the very first day two impossible things happened to notice each other at all.

It was, she would think later, turning the memory over the way she turned over very little else in her existence, precisely because almost nothing else had ever earned the returning -- it was, in its own strange and understated way, funny. The single most powerful being across the past, present, and future of everything that has ever existed or will exist, discovered by nothing more than a choice she made herself, and greeted, for the very first time, as though she were nobody at all -- because she had asked, with one small and gentle lie, to be nobody, and he had given her exactly that, without ever once suspecting the size of the mercy he was performing.