Movement Thirteen — What the Vision Actually Showed

I do want to say one thing more about the vision itself, before I close this account entirely, because I think it deserves more care than a single passing description can give it.

Iris did not choose that particular image at random. I want you to understand that. She is not a being who reaches for horror simply because horror makes for a compelling story — she has seen enough of it, across the whole span of her existence, that she has long since lost whatever appetite a smaller being might still carry for shock on its own terms. When she let that scene rise behind her eyes, unshared, wearing Flora's shape and Ilyrisse's hand, she was not inventing a threat to frighten herself with. She was remembering one. Whatever she has seen, in whatever fold of the future her sight is capable of reaching, that castle — this castle, the one all of them currently call home — falls. Whatever fills it now, the long stone table, the balcony with its unrailed lip, the conservatory where she tends her one patch of real earth, all of it becomes, in some version of what's still to come, a battlefield soaked through with a violence Ilyrisse herself commits.

I do not know what could drive Ilyrisse to such a thing. I want to be honest with you about that, the same honesty I've offered you in every account so far. I have theories. I am not going to share them yet, and I want to tell you plainly why: because I think the shape of this mystery matters more, right now, left whole and unbroken, than any partial answer I could offer you would be worth. Some things are better understood slowly, the way Flora understands most things — not through explanation, but through simply living long enough beside the mystery that its edges eventually soften into something the heart can hold, even before the mind has caught up to naming it.

I will tell you one thing more, though, because I think it belongs here rather than nowhere: this is not the only vision of a terrible future Iris carries. There is another, older, one she has spoken of only once, obliquely, to Ilyrisse alone, long before any of the rest of the household existed to overhear it — a vision of Eremos himself, grown vast and corrupted by the unchecked weight of his own power, standing as something the old household privately calls the Mountain, a shape too large and too changed to recognize as the man any of them currently love. It was that vision, not this one, that first sent Iris looking for the seed on the colorless hill centuries before she otherwise might have found it — an intervention meant to prevent exactly the future she feared most, by loving him early enough, and completely enough, that the corruption might never take root the same way.

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I do not know whether these two visions are the same fear wearing different faces, or two entirely separate futures, both still possible, both still waiting somewhere in the branching dark ahead of this household. I do not know whether the castle's ruin and the Mountain's rise are connected, sequential, or entirely unrelated nightmares that simply happen to share a single, overtaxed woman's capacity to carry them both. I offer you the question rather than an answer, because I think, honestly, that is all I currently have to offer.

What I can tell you, with more confidence than any of my guesses about the vision's meaning, is this: Iris chose to show it to Flora rather than carry it alone. That is not nothing. A being who has spent the whole of her existence holding total knowledge by herself, unwitnessed, uncorrected, entirely without anyone capable of sharing the weight of what she sees — that same being sat down beside the smallest, gentlest member of this household and handed over a piece of her own private terror, wrapped in a fable simple enough for Flora to carry without breaking under it. I think that is, in its own quiet way, one of the bravest things I have ever watched her do. Braver, in its own register, than anything she might do with the full scale of her power on display. It costs a being like Iris very little to unmake a world. It costs her considerably more to let herself be comforted by a girl who once thought stars were food.

I have wondered, too, whether the vision is fixed, or whether it is only one branch among several — the way, this account has already told you, an entire other telling of this world exists somewhere, in which Iris herself never appeared at all. Perhaps the ruined castle is no more certain a future than that other rumor-shrouded timeline is a present. Perhaps Flora's own answer — if the future already changed once, maybe it can change again — applies here more literally than either of them understood in the moment. I would like to believe that. I am not certain belief is the same thing as evidence, and I have never once pretended, across any of these accounts, that the two are interchangeable.