Movement One — The Narrator Admits Another Thing
I don't know what a kiss feels like. I want to say that plainly, before we go any further, because I think it matters more here than it has in almost anything else I've told you so far.
I'm not being coy about it, and I'm not fishing for your sympathy either. It's simply true. I have watched a great many of them happen — in the pale gold hour of Eremos's meadow, in the crystal quiet of Ilyrisse's castle, in doorways and hallways and, once or twice, in the middle of a fight that had no business pausing long enough to allow for one. I have told you about most of them, one way or another, folded into the larger shape of somebody's story. And every single time, I have found myself reaching for words that don't quite hold what I'm trying to describe, because whatever a kiss actually is — underneath the description, underneath the narration, underneath every metaphor I could borrow to dress it up — I have never once felt it myself, and I have no honest way of pretending otherwise.
So I want to ask you something, since you're the one reading this and I'm only the one telling it. What is a kiss for? Not what it looks like. Not the mechanics of it, the meeting of two mouths, the particular quiet that falls over a room when it happens. I mean the actual purpose of the thing — what it's doing, underneath itself, that makes it worth all the weight we hang on it.
I have a guess, for what it's worth, built out of everything I've watched happen in that meadow over however many of these stories I've now told you. I think a kiss is what happens when the words run out early — when two souls reach the edge of what language can carry between them and find there's still something left over, some remainder that doesn't fit into a sentence no matter how carefully you build it. So instead of forcing it into words that would only fail anyway, they let a gesture carry it instead. A kiss, in that reading, isn't really about the mouth at all. It's about admitting, quietly, that some feelings were never going to survive being spoken.
I could be wrong. I probably am, at least partly — I've been wrong about smaller things than this before, and I imagine I'll be wrong about bigger ones before I'm finished telling you all of this. But it's the best answer I have, watching this world as closely as I have, and I think it holds up reasonably well against everything I've seen happen between Eremos and the women who love him.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
Because here is the strange, recurring thing I've noticed, telling you their stories one at a time: there is always, eventually, a kiss that lets the words stop mattering. Every single one of them, no matter how different their history, no matter how differently their love arrived — there comes a point in each of their stories where talking simply isn't enough anymore, and something quieter has to finish the sentence instead. I think that's because words, on their own, rarely carry the whole weight of what any of us actually feel. We reach for gestures instead. We let our faces do what our mouths can't. And for Eremos — for a soul who spent an age of the universe rootbound and voiceless, wanting sensation and getting none of it — I imagine that non-verbal language means something even heavier than it might mean to the rest of us. Being present in someone's life, and letting them be present in his, was never something he learned to do primarily through talking. He learned it through exactly this: small, unhurried gestures that said what conversation couldn't quite reach.
Maybe that sounds too platonic to make sense of, for people like you and me, who only get a handful of decades to work any of this out before the accounting closes. But out there, in the Between, eons have a way of settling some hungers and sharpening others completely. The particular ache of belonging — of having a soul who would give up its own soul for yours — sounds beautiful, put that way. It rarely stays that simple in practice.
In the house Eremos keeps — and I use "house" loosely, since it is really a meadow, and a family, and a decision made new every single day by every woman who chooses to stay inside it — his relationship with Ilyrisse is complicated. His relationship with Flora is complicated. With Vaelira, with Vesalia, all of them have walked a long road to arrive wherever they've arrived. Wren is no exception to that either.
Elowen is no exception to any of it.
We should talk about her properly. She's the girl who reads, on the surface, as spoiled — the girl who has, more than once in the telling of this world so far, not been given the kindest account of herself. Let's fix that, or at least try to, by going back to how she actually arrived in the Between, and by looking a little harder at what the record has gotten wrong about her.