V. The Hole

The visions, when they came clearly enough to be called visions rather than dreams, always began the same way: with Eremos standing very still, his back to her, enormous and unmoving in a way his actual body had never once been, between the household and some encroaching danger too vast and too formless for Ilyrisse's waking mind to render into any shape more precise than the dark, again, always the dark.

She had come, across the long private accumulation of these visions, to understand a great deal about how such a future would begin, even if she still did not know, with any certainty, whether it was memory of something already decided somewhere beyond her reach, or warning of something still, mercifully, undecided. She understood that it would not begin with malice. It would begin, the way every truly devastating choice Eremos had ever made across his strange existence had begun, with love — with a threat large enough that no ordinary defense would suffice, and a boy who had never once, in the whole of his existence, learned how to let anyone he loved absorb a cost he believed he could absorb instead.

He would become the Mountain the way a person becomes anything permanent: gradually, and then all at once, each individual choice along the way looking, in isolation, entirely reasonable — one more concession, one more layer of himself set aside in favor of the household's safety, until there was simply nothing left of the boy who cried over birds and got possessive over bread and let a witch drape herself across every private moment he tried to have, and only the wall remained, ancient and unmoving and eternally, silently, devoted.

He is digging his own hole, Ilyrisse wrote in the ledger, on the nights the visions came clearest, one small devoted concession at a time, and calling the digging love, and I do not know how to make him stop without also, somehow, making him stop loving us at all, and I refuse — I absolutely refuse — to purchase his continued smallness at the cost of his tenderness. I do not want a version of him careful enough to survive that has also stopped being generous enough to be worth surviving as.

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This was, she had come to understand, the actual and terrible shape of her arithmetic: not simply how do I stop this future, which would have been comparatively simple, a matter of vigilance and intervention and enough careful maneuvering to close off every door that led toward his self-erasure. The real calculation, the one that kept her awake long past the hour any reasonable soul would have surrendered to rest, was subtler and crueler than that. How do I stop this future without also, in the stopping, teaching him that his love has to be smaller and more careful in order to be safe. How do I fill in the hole he is digging without also convincing him that digging holes for the people he loves was itself a wrongness, when so much of what makes him worth loving is precisely his willingness to dig.

She did not have an answer. Some nights, sitting alone in the coldest gallery of her glass castle, doing the same exhausting private accounting over and over without ever once arriving at a total she trusted, she suspected there was no answer available to her at all — that some loves were simply too large to be made permanently safe, and the only honest choice left to a person who loved someone like that was not prevention but presence: not stopping the digging, which she increasingly suspected was beyond any power she possessed, but simply making absolutely certain that whatever hole he eventually found himself standing in, he would never once have to stand in it alone.

If he digs it, she wrote, in the final entry of that particular night's ledger, then I will fill in beside him, not instead of him. I will not let the hole take him without also taking me. Whatever happens to the boy who was once a mute plant on a colorless hill, whatever future finally decides to collect on his devotion, it will have to collect on mine as well, because I have already decided — the way he decided, standing between me and the dark in my dream, his small arms spread, his voice without a single tremor in it — that the cost of staying beside him is one I am entirely willing to pay, no matter what it costs me.