Movement Three — The Story Begins

Iris began, turning toward Flora, and a scene rose behind her own eyes that she did not share aloud, though I could see it, the way I can sometimes see the things this family doesn't say out loud to each other. It wore Flora's shape. It stood in what looked, at first glance, like a desolate place — until you looked closer, and understood, from the particular fractured geometry of it, from the crystal shards scattered like frozen rain across the ground, that it was not some unknown ruin at all. It was Ilyrisse's own castle. The one they all lived in now, the one none of them had ever seen anything but whole.

I want to describe it carefully, because I think the vision deserves better than a single passing glance, however much this account intends to leave most of it mercifully undetailed. The grand hall, where the long stone table usually holds a whole family's worth of shared meals and half-finished arguments, stood instead in ruin — the great crystal columns that ordinarily caught and scattered the castle's ambient light now toppled, their broken faces no longer catching anything at all, simply reflecting back the same flat gray the rest of the Between wears when nothing bothers to warm it. The high windows, the ones that usually let the castle's borrowed sunset color the whole hall gold in the late hours, had shattered outward rather than inward, as though whatever violence had passed through that room had needed more room to finish than the walls were built to contain.

In that vision, Flora lay on the ground without breath. I will not describe the particulars of how she came to be lying there, because I do not think either of us benefits from that description, and because this account has never once believed that grief needs every detail spelled out to land with its full weight. It is enough to say she looked, in that vision, exactly as small and as unguarded as she always looks, curled the way she curls when she's fallen asleep against Eremos's side after a long evening — except this time, nothing about the stillness read as rest.

Around her, bodies — more than this account is willing to count for you, more than I think either of us would benefit from counting together. If you looked closely at the fallen, at the particular pattern the crystal had shattered into around them, you would understand, the way careful observers of this world always eventually understand, that this violence had come from a very specific and very familiar hand. Not chaos. Not the indiscriminate wreckage of a domain torn loose without a hand steering it. Every wound, this account has been told, carried the same signature, the same precise, unhesitating economy of motion — the mark of someone who had known, exactly, what she meant to do, and had done it without a single wasted movement.

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Far off, at the edge of that ruined place, stood a woman. A sword in her hand, the blade wet with something crimson, the particular color that marks a blade recently used rather than merely carried. She stood very still, the way Ilyrisse always stands still, composed even now, even here, even surrounded by a wreckage this account has no honest way of softening for you. And if you were sharp enough — if you looked closely enough at that sword, at the exact wound it had left in Flora, at the identical wounds it had left in the countless others scattered across that broken hall — you would recognize it. The same sword. The same hand. Ilyrisse.

Why would she have done such a thing? What could possibly have happened, to bring her to that?

I do not think Iris knows the full answer. I want to be honest about that, the same honesty I've offered you across every account so far. What she has seen is a fragment — a single frozen moment pulled loose from whatever longer chain of events leads to it, the way you might glimpse a single page torn from a book with no cover, no author's name, no way of confirming when in the whole of the story it belongs. She does not know what drives Ilyrisse to that hall, to that sword, to that ruin. She only knows, with the total, unshakable certainty of a being who has never once been wrong about anything she's seen, that somewhere in the accumulating weight of this world's future, that moment exists, waiting.

Iris sighed, hearing Flora's small, patient request that she finally begin the story properly, rather than simply standing there, lost inside whatever she was carrying behind her own quiet face.

She began. She told her about the paradox of time, and about the particular dilemma belonging to a being that holds too much power to be measured by anyone, including, on its worse days, itself.