Ilyrisse has a way of going still before she asks me something that actually matters to her — a stillness distinct from her ordinary stillness, which is itself already the stillness of a woman who ruled centuries by making sure her face never told anyone anything for free. This one is different. This one has a held breath in it.
We were nowhere in particular. That is the truest thing I can say about the World Fragment on an ordinary evening — nowhere in particular, which is its own kind of miracle in a world built entirely out of somewhere. The grass under us was real, or as real as anything gets to be here, green in the low gold light I chose for this hour because I remembered, from some fragment of a life I can barely call my own, that light like this used to mean the day was ending well. She was lying against my chest with one hand flat over my heart, not listening for anything — she doesn't need to, the Heartthread does that work for both of us now — but resting it there anyway, the way a person keeps a hand on a door they already know is locked, simply because the wood is warm.
"You've told me almost everyone," she said, into the quiet, in the voice she uses when she has been turning a question over for longer than she wants to admit. "Vesalia. The cartographer. The dragon who wouldn't wear a face for the first century I knew of her. Faelia, who grew herself up rather than stay small around you." A small huff of breath that was almost a laugh. "I could recite the order back to you better than you remember it yourself."
"You could," I agreed. I know better than to argue with her about the things she's decided to remember perfectly. It is one of the few forms of vanity she still permits herself.
"There is one you never tell in order," she said. "You mention her. In passing. The way you'd mention weather that happened a long time ago, in a place you don't visit anymore. And then you stop, and you never circle back, and I have never once pushed, because you get a look on your face when her name comes close that I have learned to leave alone." She tipped her head back against my shoulder so she could see my face without having to sit up, which is, for her, an enormous concession — Ilyrisse does not like to be looked at from below, some old reflex from a life where looking up at anyone was a kind of surrender she'd trained out of her own body a long time ago. She does it for me now. She does almost nothing for anyone else. "Flora," she said. "You've never told me Flora properly. From the beginning. The whole thing, the way you tell the others."
I felt something in my chest do the thing it does when a name lands somewhere old — not pain, exactly. Closer to the specific ache of pressing a thumb into a bruise you'd half forgotten you had, just to confirm it's still tender, still yours, still proof that something happened to you once.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
"There's a reason I tell that one differently," I admitted.
"I know there's a reason." She said it without accusation. Ilyrisse has buried enough of her own reasons under enough of her own silences that she has never once demanded I hand mine over faster than I'm willing to. It is, I think, the single kindest thing about her, and the thing almost no one who knew her in life would believe if I told them. "I'm not asking because I think you're hiding something ugly. I've seen the way you go soft around her, on the rare Turn days I've caught the edge of her presence near you. I don't think it's ugly. I think it's simply — early. Something you haven't finished feeling all the way through yet, even after all this time. And I would like to understand it. Not to solve it. Just to hold it, the way you let me hold everything else."
There is no arguing with a woman who asks for your grief that gently. I don't think there ever has been.
"It starts smaller than the others," I told her, settling deeper into the grass, one hand finding its way into the pale fall of her hair, because my hands have never fully learned how to tell a story without something to hold onto while they do it. "Smaller, and slower, and for a long time it isn't really a story about her at all. It's a story about not knowing what I was looking at."
"Tell it anyway," Ilyrisse said. "Slow is not a flaw in a story, Eremos. Some of the ones I love best are the ones that take the longest to become anything."
So I told her.
I want to say I was looking for the Empress that day, because I am always looking for the Empress on some level, in the particular way a compass is always pointing north even when nobody's holding it — but the honest truth is that I wasn't thinking about her at all in the hours before I found Flora. I was simply walking, in the aimless, directionless way I still walked in those years, before missions became frequent enough to structure my existence into something with a shape, back when the stretches between them were long enough that I had learned to fill them by moving rather than by staying still, because stillness, for me, still smelled faintly of the millions of years I'd spent unable to do anything else.
The Between does not care whether you are going somewhere. It offers the same gray, patient, magnificent ruin-scape to a soul with a destination as it does to a soul with none — the same skylines rising up out of nothing on the horizon like teeth, built by souls with enough coin and enough centuries to raise something real out of an inanimate world; the same enormous, humbling distances that make every direction feel equally like the wrong one. I had been walking, that day, through one of the long, uninhabited stretches between two such skylines — the kind of territory where you can go what feels like weeks without passing another silhouette, where the silence gets loud enough that you start narrating your own footsteps just to have something to listen to.
That is where I found her. Or rather — that is where I almost didn't.