Before he reached them, he stopped. He had been walking toward the higher reaches of the heavens, toward whoever might hold the authority to grant what he had finally decided to ask for, and somewhere in the pale endless stretch between where he had been sitting and where he needed to go, his feet simply ceased moving, the particular stillness of someone who understood, suddenly and completely, that he could not walk into this decision without first doing the one thing his entire existence had been built around.
He needed to remember.
Properly. Fully. Not the habitual remembering that came with simply existing as something that forgot nothing, but the deliberate kind, the kind that chose to look directly at everything instead of letting it sit passively in the particular architecture of a mind that held all things equally without ever needing to revisit any of them.
He sat down where he stood.
He closed his eyes, which was unnecessary in the strictest sense, since sight had never been the mechanism through which he held what he held, but the gesture felt correct, felt like the proper posture for what he was about to do, and he let himself sink backward through everything he had ever witnessed.
He began at the beginning.
He remembered the first thing he had ever watched, so far back that the memory itself felt less like an image and more like a texture, the particular quality of a universe still settling into its earliest shapes, beings who existed before the concept of names had fully solidified into something stable enough to apply. He remembered watching the first loss he had ever witnessed, Draken, the first name on a list that would never stop growing, and the particular shock of understanding, for the first time, what watching something end actually meant.
He remembered all of them after that.
Not in order, exactly, because order had stopped meaning much to him centuries ago, the particular linear progression of cause and effect blurring at the edges of something that experienced time the way an ocean experienced individual waves, present everywhere at once rather than arriving in sequence. He remembered Aquila's laugh, too loud, apologized for every single time. He remembered Sienna's garden, watered the morning before everything ended. He remembered Mirelle's silence, which had never needed filling.
He remembered every single name on the list, fully, completely, the texture and weight of each individual loss arriving with a clarity that the simple recitation of names had never quite captured.
He remembered Nilah.
The particular fire that had burned brighter in the presence of malevolence, the wandering swordsman who had struggled with purpose after the war ended, haunted by losses she carried the way he carried all of his, except hers had eventually found their ending, their integration, their transformation into something survivable, while his had simply continued to accumulate.
He remembered Maeve.
The scholar who held on longer than was fair, who gave herself so that the others might have a fighting chance, the particular selflessness that he had watched unfold with a horror that had never fully released him even weeks later.
He remembered Johann.
The boy with the smile too bright for the weight he carried, who had taken everything onto himself in the final moment, who had sacrificed himself to end Vazroth and end his own existence in the same impossible motion, the particular sacrifice that Blook had watched with a closeness that made the distance between watching and participating feel, in that exact moment, thinner than it had ever felt before or since.
He remembered all of it.
Every grief. Every joy that had preceded the grief and made it heavier for having existed first. Every small private moment no one else had been close enough to witness, the conversations whispered in dark rooms, the decisions made in solitude that no history would ever record, the particular fullness of a life lived completely even when that life ended far sooner than it should have.
He remembered the centuries between losses too.
The quiet stretches where nothing terrible happened, where people simply lived, built things, loved each other, grew old in the ordinary unremarkable way that most of existence actually consisted of, the particular texture of normal life that the list of losses had never adequately represented because grief was loud and ordinary life was quiet, and he had spent so long cataloging the loud parts that he had nearly forgotten how much of what he witnessed had simply been people, living, without any tragedy attached to the living at all.
He remembered that too, now. Deliberately. Fully. He remembered Illia.
Centuries of her cheerful directness, her brush that could paint anything into and out of existence, the particular ease with which she had agreed, without hesitation, to go sit outside a grieving woman's door for two weeks because he had asked her to. He remembered every conversation they had ever had, the small ones and the significant ones, the particular companionship that had been the closest thing to genuine connection his existence had ever afforded him. He sat with all of it.
Hours passed, though hours meant little in a place that did not measure time the way mortal places did. He simply remained there, in the pale endless light, holding the entirety of his existence in his awareness at once, every loss and every joy and every quiet unremarkable stretch between them, the complete and total weight of everything he had ever witnessed across more years than any single accounting could properly capture.
It was enormous.
It was, he understood now, holding all of it simultaneously for what might be the final time, the only thing he had ever truly possessed. Not a home, not a purpose, not even really an identity in the way mortal things understood identity. Just this. The accumulated weight of having watched everything, the particular completeness of a memory that forgot nothing, finally being given its proper farewell before being asked to disappear entirely.
He did not cry. He was not certain he possessed the mechanism for it, not in any way that would have produced something visible.
But something in him, sitting with the whole of his existence held fully in view for what would likely be the last time he was ever capable of doing so, ached in a way that felt, finally, almost like the grief he had spent so long watching other people transform into something survivable.
He opened his eyes.
The heavens remained exactly as they had been, pale and endless and indifferent, and Blook stood slowly, the entirety of everything he had just remembered settling back into its usual passive architecture, no longer actively held but not forgotten either, not yet.
He continued walking toward the higher reaches.
He carried everything with him, the whole enormous weight of it, knowing that within the hour, or the day, or however long the asking required, he would be setting all of it down for good.