Page 36 of Of Sockets Of Stitches
Until now.
Their chant filled me. And though I did not know the language of the dead, I could make the sounds with my torsioned lips and in this state where I was an impressionable child and brimming with maternal vigil.
I sat cross-legged. My body swayed and dipped in circles with the swaying and dipping circles of other mothers. I sensed this was reality. For in truth, my sights fixed unblinkingly on the tumultuous and swirling thunderclouds above.
Power.
Understanding of power awaited me.
The ancient knowledge built in me, drawn out of the world’s center and upward into my body by the vigil of fifty mothers and fifty daughters. The circling dip of my bodybecame more urgent and erratic, as if my torso was being batted back and forth by a cat set on torturing its prey.
The rhythm quickened into a blur of the departed. My throat vibrated with the words of the undead that I could not fathom: the language of withered mothers.
I should not speak these words, I knew. They were not mine, not even meant for a queen. But there was that which had to be known to save the world. I must be privy to ancient understandings beyond my ability to connect, and fifty mothers had always been the medium by which monsterdom arrived to me. They were the heart of my monsterdom; They, and their stitches and patches that had made me.
Thunderclouds gathered. And I was already somehow aware of what must be, in the same way that fifty mothers always seemed to garner what must happen too.
I knew it was coming, for the lightning of ancients struck the first mother, Cassandra, in a great sandstorm. The purpose of ancients had filled her after.
I watched as lightning sparked high above, a sudden flare of white in a grayscale world—an eruption in a silent storm. I did not look away as the lightning speared toward me, for in this childlike state I could not fear. There was only trust that fifty mothers would guide and nurture me.
My head and back crashed flat against the ground as the lightning pinned me down. My body rattled and leaped as the ancient force continued to pour through me and into the ground.
I was a conduit. And though my eyes were wide and unblinking—blindedby white—my internal eyes could see everything previously unseen as a queen.
My power.
Here was the place where body and mind were eradicated and overwhelmed, so only my power remained. And my power whispered to me.
My power pulled back the curtain, and I glimpsed everything beyond.
From high above, I looked down upon my body where it lay on the dirt ground in the middle of fifty mothers. Lightning speared me there, and Iwasa conduit indeed. A queenly paintbrush for ancients to draw the truth.
The lightning pouring through me snaked out in lines from the base of my tower and outward in all directions. As I watched from high above, I could see the pattern emerging.
The white snaking lines were akin to veins. All of the veins were connecting to each other in an intricate web. Thicker lines, like arteries, were forming between sections of smaller lines.
Once the web was complete, the area surrounding my tower flared brilliant white and started to throb.
To pulse.
Like a heart.
I hovered in my power as my body and mind continued to be obliterated by ancient lightning, and I understood very easily and naturally that ancients had just revealed the circulatory system of the world.
The lightning cut off, burned away like silk and ribbon. My body was no longer pinned to the ground. The map of the world’s circulatory system was complete.
Below, my body lifted off the ground. It rose in the air until ancients deposited me atop the tower so surrounded by the pulsing white. Even amid my power, I could barely tolerate looking upon its brilliance.
I was set on my feet beside an olden rock.
And then my power stopped whispering so clearly to me.
A blink, and I was back within my body and staring out across the haze. The olden rock was beside me. Mind, body, and power hummed harmoniously in me for the first time in queendom.Allparts of me understood.
I looked out at everything that ancients had revealed. A mapwas carved in the barren world, from tower and through the haze.
While in my power, I had seen the version of a healthy and saved world. Butnow, I saw how the world really was, so near The Real End.
