Movement Two — What We Told You Was Not the Whole Truth

You will recall — I told this part myself, with my own mouth, sitting in that very chair — that I said Eremos had not visited Selwyn as often, in recent years, purely because of the accumulating, ordinary weight of everyone else who also needed him. That is true. It is not, however, the entire reason, and I let you believe it was the entire reason because the rest of it belonged to a story I was not ready to tell yet.

Here is the rest of it.

The alters have to come out. This is not optional, the way it might be optional for the rest of us to sit with an old grief until it softens on its own timeline. Think of what happens to the rest of us when a feeling gets too large for its container. You clench a fist. You say something you regret. You laugh too loud, or you weep, or your face simply, helplessly, does the thing your heart is doing without asking your permission first. We let things out in small, ordinary ways, constantly, without noticing we are doing it, because the alternative — holding it all in, indefinitely — is not something a person can survive doing.

Eremos does not get the small, ordinary ways. Not fully. Not for the pieces of him that live in the seven. And so the longer he spends in the Between without some kind of release, the stronger the pressure behind each one becomes, and the worse it goes for him, and for whatever is standing nearby, when it finally finds its own way out.

I think it is worth reminding you, here, exactly what he is underneath all of it, because I do not want this story to unmoor you from the man you already know. He spent an age of the universe as a Void Plant — rootbound, wordless, folding toward whatever light happened to fall across him, understanding patience the way the rest of us understand breathing, because patience was the only shape his existence had ever taken. That is why he can sit with Flora for years, teaching her to speak and to walk and to want things, without a single flicker of frustration crossing him. That is why he gave a philosopher's riddle back an answer no one had ever managed to surprise her with — me, he said, when she asked him to name something that had never once been asked what it wanted, because he was that thing, for longer than any of you have existed to ask him anything at all. He does not classify people by status or by seniority. He classifies them by need, and he gives himself, entire and undivided, to whoever is standing in front of him carrying the most of it — even when that means breaking the very schedule the household built for itself, even when it means Elowen, newly arrived and still carrying her old court's rigid instincts, has to be gently reminded that the schedule was never the point, that it was only ever the shape love took when it needed a shape at all.

He has forgiven things the rest of us would have called unforgivable. He let the blind man go, at the end of that terrible mission with the tavern-keeper's wife, not because the man had earned forgiveness by any honest measure, but because some part of Eremos still honored the shape of a father's affection even once he'd learned the affection had been built on a lie. He visits Selwyn — visited, before this story, more often than he does now — and brings her small, foolish gifts, a carved bird, a length of ribbon, simply because he cannot stand the thought of a soul going unnoticed while there is still breath in him to notice her with.

That is the man you already know. I am not asking you to unlearn any of it. I am only asking you to understand that a man built entirely out of feeling everything permanently, at full weight, forever, cannot also be a man with nowhere to put any of it. Something has to give. For a long while, his time with the women who share his life — with all of you — was good. I do not want you to hear anything I am about to say as a complaint against that. He tried, and largely succeeded, to be present, to be gentle, to give warmth back in the same measure he was given it. But he is the most broken soul in this entire house, more than any of you, whatever any of you privately believe about your own damage, and the weight he carries because of it is heavier than anyone else's, because a single mistake does not simply hurt him. It costs him himself. If any one of the seven ever slipped its leash entirely — truly, permanently — he would stop being Eremos. He would become whichever one of them had finally won, and none of you would get him back the way you have known him.

This is not a secret from the rest of the family, in case any of you are wondering how much you have been kept in the dark. Many of you already knew, or suspected, or had pieced enough of it together from things half-said over the years. The reason Vaelira — the reason I — gave him the Garden of a Thousand Souls was precisely this. To give the pressure somewhere to go that was not one of you. To let the alters have a controlled outlet instead of an uncontrolled one. I will not pretend it as anything cleverer than it was: I made him a place to bleed that would not bleed onto the people he loved. I picked amber and violet for the light I gave that garden because they were the colors already living in my own rings, the same colors that turn like a slow, patient clock at the edge of my own eyes — I wanted him to feel, walking into it, that some part of me was standing there with him even when I wasn't.

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I should tell you, while we're being honest tonight, that the garden was never built to hold the Unquenched specifically. It was built for something quieter, something that needed a warm half and a dark half in equal measure — a place for the tormented to be tended and the tormentors to be quarantined, side by side, without either canceling the other out. I did not know, the day I first folded that pocket of Something into being, that I was also building the only place in the entire Between capable of receiving whatever the Unquenched left behind it, once its work was finished. Some gifts turn out larger than the hands that gave them ever intended. I have made my peace with that particular surprise, the same way I've made my peace with most of the surprises this family keeps handing me, one century at a time.

Now. All of you know the story of Vesalia, our sovereign mother — you know her part of it, at least, the part that belongs to her, the gods who shaped her, the daughter, the man she loved who was also the man who let her die. I have watched her carry that story for longer than she has ever let most of you see clearly. I have watched her, in quiet moments no one else caught, begin counting the knives in a room the instant something good happened to her — an old, worn habit built out of a life spent waiting for goodness to be the setup for its own betrayal. I was the one who overheard it first, all those centuries ago, feigning sleep while she told it to Ilyrisse in pieces too raw for daylight. I have never once told her I know the whole of it. Some kindnesses are quieter than confession.

I think of the Pale Stone incident often, when I think of how deep that old habit runs in her — the night she came closer than any of us like to admit to simply fading where she stood, worn thin by grief she'd been carrying alone rather than ask any of us to help her hold it. It was Faelia who found her that night, of all people — young, bright, clumsy Faelia, who has never once in her existence known the right thing to say and somehow, that particular evening, said nothing at all, and simply held her in silence until Eremos arrived and carried them both back to the meadow. I think about that night whenever I watch Vesalia begin, instinctively, to count the knives in a room. I think about how close we came to losing her before any of us understood how quietly she'd learned to drown.

What none of you have been told, and what I am telling you now, is that her story and Eremos's were tangled together long before the two of them ever sat across from each other and decided to be gentle about it. Their threads of fate had already crossed. He knew, from the moment he learned what had been done to her — the man called Kaelen, who raised her as a weapon dressed in the language of devotion, who broke something in her at nineteen years old that never fully mended; Doran, who loved her honestly and then stood still and watched her die anyway, because staying still had always been easier for him than choosing a side — exactly what kind of creatures had done it to her, and he does not carry knowledge like that the way most of us carry knowledge. He carries it the way a wound carries a splinter — quietly, until it is disturbed, and then not quietly at all.

I once witnessed something that I do not think Eremos knows I witnessed — a poem, if you want to call it that, though it read more like something torn out of him under duress than something composed. It showed a hatred and a longing for vengeance toward the beings Vesalia had called gods, deeper than anything I have ever seen him direct at anything else, in all our years together. I will not reproduce it for you here, whole — some things a man writes in the middle of the night, alone, believing no one will ever read them, are not mine to hand around a room, however much this account has already asked of your trust tonight. I will tell you only that it did not read like poetry the way poetry usually reads. It read like something bled onto a page rather than written on one, the meter breaking wherever the feeling underneath it broke, entire lines abandoned mid-thought the way a man abandons a sentence when the next word would cost him more than he can currently afford to spend.

There were many of them — the gods, I mean, the ones who had shaped and used and finally discarded her. Finding them, in a world this large, was not easy — but it was not impossible, either, and there were nights, over the centuries, when Eremos went looking, and found one, and — well. I am told, by the ones who were there, that it did not go well for the god in question.

The plant that has always been a synonym for patience, when he looked at the root of his beloved's suffering, could not wait even one more second.

Let me tell you about the last time that happened.