Page 73 of Of Sockets Of Stitches
The last of the black evaporated, the last of the sickness in this frayed seam and artery was gone.
But my heart thudded in a dreadful way that it rarely had.
“Where are they?” whispered Princess Bring. “I did not hold onto them. Was I meant to hold on to them?”
Princess Take wrapped an arm around the princess, uncaring of her slime. “We were not meant to hold them.”
I paced atop the jutting pedestal of land where we now were. Everything below us on all sides was a crater of dust and dirt. “They must be here. I need four champions.”
But did I? I could be certain of very little. Perhaps mothers were not the only ones meant to die.
Then what was the point of saving the world? What was the point if monsters must die? They must be alive.
“Here!” shouted Princess Change.
There were many times that I might have detested her, but I might have happily kissed her now.
I blurred across dirt to her, and located the red sparkle through the grassland steadily forming. The duke had always been fond of covering his fingers in jewels, and a sole ruby had remained uncovered by dirt to act as a survival beacon.
My monsters are safe.
Releasing my power, I forced the dirt down and away from them. Duke Raise’s limp form was quickly revealed.
“Where is the duchess?” I muttered.
I dug. They had fallen into the sea close to one another. She must be close by. The princesses were tending to the duke, pulling him out to the surface that was rapidly forming into a lush and green miracle that I could barely have imagined.
But I could not appreciate the miracle. Not when a monster was lost.
I readied my power to dig up the entire crater, but a hand on my arm made me pause.
Princess Change did not look at me. She stared out at the impossible and vibrant forest. As we watched, the trees and vines climbed high above us and obscured all sense of the vastness the crater had conveyed so effortlessly. This seam. This artery that had been hardly that any longer… was healed.
We would only confirm how much of the world was healed from the sky, but I imagined that our previous efforts had been nothingon this.
“We are meant to heal the world, not dig it apart,” said the princess.
“I must find my monster,” I replied, and even stepped to do so.
Princess Change hushed, “And how might ancients interpret that?”
I glanced back at her with unseeing eyes as my minds grasped her simple question. They would grasp that I was disrespecting their gift.
I would be disrespecting Richalle’s efforts. Not just of tonight but those of her life and death.
“The mother seemed certain when she poured through the duke and duchess,” murmured the princess next.
She had.
She had, no less.
“You wish me to realize that I was not meant to save Duchess Raise. You wish me to accept that she was a sacrifice. How shall I do that when I have the power to be sure my monster is not buried in dirt? How shall I answer the duke when he wakes and his wife is gone and lost?”
“I am not Queen” was the answer. “Yet the duchess tunneled through the world to get here, and if she is buried, I would fathom that she might tunnel back. To you, and certainly to him.”
I closed my eyes. “You are saying I must have faith in ancients.”
“And in your monsters, my queen. Nothing simple could have come of healing such a wound.”
