8.7 -- What Neither of Them Could Answer

The question, when it finally surfaced, did not arrive from either of them directly. It simply settled into the space between them, the way certain questions do after enough silence has passed to make them unavoidable.

"Tell me honestly," Vaelira said, at last, staring up at the high crystal ceiling rather than at Ilyrisse, as if it were easier to ask this of the glass than of a face. "Was it worth it? Leaving him behind -- whoever he was to each of us, whatever we each decided not to walk toward -- to end up as one bloom in Eremos's garden instead. Is this the life either of us actually wanted, or is it simply the life that was left over once we'd already made our choice?"

Ilyrisse didn't answer right away. It was not a question she allowed herself often, precisely because some part of her suspected there was no honest answer available at all -- only two incompatible true things, sitting side by side, refusing to resolve into a single verdict no matter how long she turned them over.

"I don't know," she said finally, and it cost her something to say it that plainly, without dressing it in anything softer. "I want to tell you it was worth it. Some nights I believe that completely, without reservation, the way I believe almost nothing else in this entire gray world. And then there are other nights -- I couldn't tell you what separates one kind of night from the other, they don't announce themselves in advance -- where I lie here, in a castle built from more warmth than most souls will ever touch, and something in me simply aches, quietly, for a life I chose not to have. I don't think that ache means I chose wrong. I've also stopped being certain it means I chose right."

"That's not comforting," Vaelira said.

"No," Ilyrisse agreed. "I don't think comfort is available here. I think the only honest thing I can offer you is that I still don't know, after all this time, and I've made a kind of peace with not knowing that isn't the same thing as an answer."

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Vaelira was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its usual armor entirely.

"I don't know either," she said. "Whether it was worth it. I tell myself, some days, that whoever that man was, I would have grown bored of him too, eventually, the way I grew bored of everything in Something until there was nothing left worth staying for. Other days I'm not sure that's true at all -- I'm not sure it's anything but a story I built so the choice would sit easier in my chest. I chose the ending I chose. I don't actually know if it was the right one. I've simply had a very long time to get used to living inside a question I can't close."

"Do you regret finding Eremos?" Ilyrisse asked, though even as she said it she wasn't sure the two questions -- regretting the man she'd walked away from, and regretting the man she'd found instead -- were as separable as the words made them sound.

"No," Vaelira said, and this at least came without hesitation. "Whatever else I don't know, I know that much. But not regretting this life isn't the same as knowing the other one wouldn't have been better. I've simply decided, somewhere along the way, that I'm not going to spend forever measuring the two against each other. It doesn't change anything. It only makes the good thing I actually have taste faintly of something borrowed."

"Then how do you carry it?" Ilyrisse asked, and there was something almost like need in the question, an honesty rare enough between them that it startled both of them a little to hear it spoken aloud.

Vaelira didn't answer immediately. When she finally did, it wasn't with an answer at all, but with something quieter, more admission than solution.

"Badly," she said. "I carry it badly, most of the time, and pretend otherwise. I suspect you do too."

Ilyrisse said nothing to that. There was nothing to say that wouldn't have been either a lie or an agreement neither of them was ready to sit inside fully. She simply let the silence stand, unresolved, exactly as honest as the question deserved.

Vaelira turned this over without offering her usual clever rebuttal, without the lazy deflection she reached for when a moment threatened to ask too much of her. She simply reached for Ilyrisse's hand and held it, wordlessly, the way two people hold onto something solid when the ground beneath a conversation has gotten too soft to trust, and neither of them tried to make the silence mean anything more certain than it was.