VII. What the Well Gives Back

There was a particular kind of night — rarer than the visions, rarer even than the recurring dream — when Ilyrisse allowed herself something closer to peace, and it was, without fail, a night that involved both of them: Eremos folded at her feet the way he folded himself at everyone's feet in this household, and Vaelira draped somewhere improbable nearby, because Vaelira was constitutionally incapable of being more than a few careless feet from him for any sustained length of time, gravity itself apparently having long ago surrendered any claim to governing where she chose to arrange her limbs.

They did not speak much, on nights like this. There was very little that needed saying between the three of them that had not already been said, in one form or another, across the long accumulated weight of their shared centuries — Ilyrisse's exhausting arithmetic, Vaelira's wordless plate-refilling, Eremos's endless small devotions handed out to every corner of a household he refused to let any part of go cold. They simply sat, together, in the gold hush of a castle built to stop one woman's thinking and had, somewhere along the way, become instead the place where three impossibly old and impossibly tired souls had finally, slowly, learned how to rest.

"You're thinking about the dream again," Vaelira said, from her sprawl against the chaise, not opening her eyes, her voice pitched low enough that it might have been mistaken, by anyone who didn't know her better, for the drowsy murmur of someone already half-asleep.

"I'm always thinking about the dream," Ilyrisse admitted, one hand still moving slow and absent through the dark green tangle of Eremos's hair. "I don't know how to stop."

"You're not supposed to stop," Vaelira said. "You're supposed to keep thinking about it until you've built enough arithmetic around it that it stops frightening you quite so much, and then you're supposed to notice, eventually, that the fear was never actually the point of the dream in the first place."

Ilyrisse looked over at her, surprised, the way she was still occasionally surprised, even after all these centuries, by the particular sharp clarity that lived underneath Vaelira's habitual laziness. "Then what was the point?"

"The point," Vaelira said, finally opening one golden, clock-ringed eye to meet Ilyrisse's gaze directly, "is that he's already told you the ending. Every single time the dream comes back, he tells you the same thing, in the same voice, and you spend the whole rest of the night trying to argue him out of a decision he made a very long time ago and has never once shown the slightest sign of reconsidering. I don't think the dream is asking you to prevent anything, Ilyrisse. I think it's asking you to finally believe him."

Eremos, still folded at Ilyrisse's feet, tilted his head up at that, his mismatched eyes catching the gold light. "Believe what?"

"That you're not going to have to do it alone," Vaelira said, to him now, her voice gone uncharacteristically gentle, stripped of its usual performed laziness. "Whatever it is. Whatever future eventually shows up asking for its price. She's already decided, the same way you decided in the dream, that she's not going to let you stand there by yourself. You two have been circling the exact same promise for centuries without either of you ever quite saying it to the other's face. I'm simply pointing out that the circling has gone on long enough."

There was a long silence after that — not an uncomfortable one, but the particular full, unhurried silence of two people finally hearing something they had each, separately, already known.

"I would jump into the hole with you," Ilyrisse said finally, quietly, looking down at him. "If that is truly where it ends. If there really is no other door left. I would not let you stand in it alone, and I would not let you convince yourself that loving me meant sparing me the choice."

Eremos was quiet for a long moment, his cheek still resting against her knee, and when he finally spoke, his voice had gone soft and thick and entirely without its usual teasing edge.

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"I know," he said. "I think I've always known. I think that's actually why I keep digging in the first place — not because I want to disappear, but because some part of me has always trusted that if it ever really came to that, you wouldn't let me do it by myself. I don't think I could have kept digging, all these years, carrying everyone's grief the way I carry it, if I hadn't believed that, somewhere underneath everything else. I don't think anyone could."

"Then stop being surprised every time I say it," Ilyrisse said, and there was something almost fierce in it, underneath the softness. "I have told you, in a hundred different ways, across a hundred different afternoons, that I am not interested in a version of love that only shows up for the easy parts. I raised you out of a mute, starving silence because I refused to let something that wanted so badly to be loved go on being nothing. I am not about to abandon that particular refusal now, at the one moment it might actually cost me something to keep it."

"Even though you don't know for certain," Eremos said, quietly, watching her with an attentiveness that made her wonder, not for the first time, exactly how much he had already guessed about the shape of what she still hadn't told him, "whether the thing you're refusing to abandon is a son, or a piece of yourself you couldn't survive keeping any other way."

Ilyrisse went very still. She had never once said the theory aloud to him — had barely allowed herself to finish forming it in the privacy of her own ledger — and yet here he was, naming its exact shape without her ever having handed him the words for it, the way he named so many of her unspoken truths, as though some old, wordless current between them simply refused to keep anything permanently hidden for long.

"How long have you known?" she asked, finally, her voice steadier than she felt.

"I didn't know," he said. "Not exactly. I've felt it, though, for a long time — something in the way you look at me sometimes, like you're checking a reflection against a memory only you can see. I never asked, because I thought you'd tell me when you were ready, and because some part of me was frightened of what it might mean if you weren't ready yet, and because —" he paused, searching for the honest shape of it, "— because it doesn't actually change anything, for me. Whatever I came from. Whether you found me, or made me, or some strange combination of both that doesn't have a name in either Something or Nothing. You're still the one who taught me to hold a cup. You're still the one I go looking for when the weight gets too heavy to carry alone. If I'm some piece of you that overflowed somewhere and had to learn how to become a person, then I think that only makes me more certain of what I already believed — that I was always yours, long before either of us understood what that word was going to cost."

Ilyrisse felt something break open in her chest, gently, the way ice breaks in a slow thaw rather than a sudden shattering — the particular unbearable relief of a truth finally handed over and found, against every fear she had carried about it, to weigh less once shared than it had ever weighed while she carried it alone.

"I did not know how to tell you," she admitted. "I have turned the theory over in my own private ledger for centuries, and every single time I came close to speaking it aloud, I found some new reason to postpone the telling. I think I was afraid that once I said it, you would stop being a gift the universe simply handed me, and start being a debt my own grief had manufactured without ever asking your permission to exist at all."

"Maybe I'm both," he said, simply. "Maybe those aren't as different as you've been treating them. A debt can still be loved completely, Mother. I don't think I mind very much which one I turn out to be, as long as I still get to be yours."

She did not trust her voice for a long moment after that, and simply let her hand resume its slow motion through his hair, grateful, in a way too large for the ledger's usual careful language, that some truths, once finally spoken, turned out to require far less courage to carry than the years of silence leading up to them had ever suggested.

Vaelira, from her sprawl, made a small satisfied sound, closing her eye again as though the matter had been settled entirely to her liking. "Good," she said. "Now that we've all agreed to be insufferably devoted to each other unto whatever eventual apocalypse, can we please discuss dinner. I am hungry, and Flora's bread was disappointing tonight, and I refuse to face any future, apocalyptic or otherwise, on an empty stomach."

Despite everything — despite the dream, and the ledger, and the exhausting private arithmetic that would, Ilyrisse already knew, return to keep her awake on some other night not so very far from this one — she found herself laughing, the same clean, unguarded laugh that had escaped her the day Eremos poured water down his own arm and grinned at her like he'd invented joy, and Eremos, hearing it, laughed too, and Vaelira, satisfied with the chaos she'd caused, allowed herself the smallest and most genuine smile she permitted anyone to see.