Movement Nine — The Narrator, One Last Word

I want to leave you, before I close this account, with the image I think matters most out of everything I've told you tonight — not the fire, and not the blade, and not even the quiet, difficult conversation that closed it out in a room lit only by a hearth that never fully goes cold.

I want to leave you with Vesalia's face, the moment she said the truest thing anyone said in that whole gathering — I won't pretend it doesn't matter to me that someone finally did. I have thought about that sentence more than almost anything else in this account, in the time since I first heard her say it. There is a particular grief, I think, in loving someone whose love for you occasionally takes a shape you would never have asked for, and there is an equal and opposite grief in being loved by someone who cannot help but answer your oldest wounds with fire, however carefully he tries to keep that fire away from your door. Both of those griefs live in this house, side by side, the way so much of what this house carries seems to live side by side without ever quite canceling each other out.

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I don't know what the Unquenched will cost him next. I don't know whose name will be the one that finally asks too much of him, or whether Vaelira's garden will always be enough to catch what spills over, or whether Iris's old, unspoken worry is a warning about a night none of us have lived through yet. I only know what I have always known, telling you every one of these stories, one soul at a time: that a lonely gray place became, somehow, full of people worth this much fire, and I do not think, whatever else this account has cost any of us to tell, that I would trade a single ember of it for a version of him that felt less.

— End of chapter—

"I do not believe in gods, nor in demons, nor in any entity higher than the ones I choose to love. Let my love be the testimony to my actions. If that makes me guilty of something, then let the Void come and tell me so itself."

The Void answered with a smile.

— Eremos