Page 37 of Of Sockets Of Stitches
No blood could have flowed in this system. Broken veins so marked with sickness and rips and despair. The thickest arteries were wrecked and twisted and hardened, and the sight of their injury drew tears to my eyes. The artery to the west. Goodness. My shoulder ached as I looked upon it. I rubbed the joint and yelped when the stitch was hot to touch.
Very hot, but why?
Not long ago that stitch was nearly ripped out of me upon placing bridal gifts on this very tower.
Ah.Butah.
Without the bridal gifts here, I could not have seen this map, and withoutbothof these ingredients, I could not have realized the hard-won truth.
I touched the stitch of my other shoulder, and an artery to the east twitched pathetically. This artery was frayed to such an extent that the two sides of its walls were nearly separated.
Frayed, one might say.
Frayed as the unions of kings and princesses were foretold to be.
My heart pumped faster, and I touched the stitches connecting my legs to my torso. One, and then the other.
Thick and frayed lines to the north and south flopped and squirmed in response.
My mind was making sense of the visual before me. There were four main arteries in the system. From them, branched tens of thousands of veins, maybe hundreds of thousands.
Four seams. Four unions.
Four arteries in dire need of mending.
But there was a fifth king, and one queen too. Where did they factor into this map of The Real End? I did not feel brave to look.
Yet monsters needed me, now and forever, and so I touched my fingers to the thick stitch connecting my head to my body.
Oof.
My knees met with stone, and the olden rock grated and whined in its fitting. I turned to peer into the rock, and a low groan left my lips.
Such hardening. Such callouses and disease. Black plague and ulcers.
A queen was the heart of monsters.
And her romance was the heart of the world.
This heart was nearly dead.
I fell against the olden stone, weak with the horror unmasked. This wasmyheart.Ourheart. So focused on unions, I had not anticipated that my romance would be necessary to saving the world, but this…
Without a healthy heart, no part of the world could survive. Even if I managed to fix all other unions.
Stone crumbled under my hands, and my right forefinger sank into a hole. I traced the hole and allowed myself a single soul-weary sigh.
I drew the fifth and final key out of my pocket.Hiskey.
King See’s key.
I drew on my power to set the gothic, delicate black key into the hole. Twist.Click.
The rock under my hands hummed, glowing deep within—a whir of a machine. As I peered out at the grayscale world again, there was a difference—a sight unlocked by the fifth key.
Seven hundred and thirteen differences to be exact, though I could not count all of them so quickly.
As a human, I had called them walled cities. They were thelast stand of humans, and of life on this world. Monsters called them pulses.
