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The swords of humanity's hatred take weeks to remove. Or, no: "weeks" is inexact. The larger unit of time implies imprecision. Belies the meticulous (and correct) tracking she has done of her time spent here: pinned to her open coffin, her only company the smell of roses and the sunlight, unrelenting, shining in her face through the clouds. (The coffin's walls shield her from the rushing wind.) Here: beyond the end of the world.
And all this to crawl back to it.
Doing this same song and dance again, for the same silly reason. One million swords, all to reach him. All to be by his side again. All to talk to him, again.
Just one last time, surely. Surely, after innumerable (quite numerable, goes the rejoinder she intentionally doesn't think) years of work with her brother to turn every other person she's ever known into carbon copies of that same brother, after years of the two of them ensuring she knows literally nothing and no one else, surely she won't cling to him again. Or let him cling to her, as if for dear life, as is his wont. She won't return to, or find, or create, a prince on a white horse again. Even one with a prettier face or with gaudier hair.
Surely.
Every time she thinks it over, she grows less convinced in there being any point at all in what she's doing.
She's given up several times before. Declared the whole thing pointless and resigned herself to her fate. There have been several discrete periods of time when this was all she did for days (whatever a "day" is, here) on end. Wake up, consider swords, stare at sun, fall asleep. Wake up, consider swords, stare at sun, fall asleep. Wake up, consider swords, stare at sun, fall asleep.
She shouldn't have started with the ones in her head. Should have saved those for last, if she was to remove them at all. Provided shade from the sun she didn't know she'd miss.
Each sword of humanity's hatred takes 3.1 seconds exactly to remove.
Her fabled hero, the prince with pink hair, had taken a few meant for her. Some 287 swords, intercepted by her limp body on the path towards their intended target. (287 betrayals for the road.) She's kept a count of how many swords she's pushed out (312,256) and should therefore know exactly how much time in swords she has left (26 days).
She's given up halfway through the extrusion a few times, meaning she has to start it over. She has no idea how long she's actually been here.
Sometimes she thinks about her hero. Her overbearing helpfulness, her cloying generosity. The most successful of her little brothers and the reason she's here right now.
She thinks of her voice, mostly. A youthful laugh and a clarion yell of astonishment. Sometimes she does this intentionally, as an attempt at motivation. This doesn't actually work.
Sometimes she also thinks of the 287 blades in her body. (288 minus one.) This doesn't particularly help, either.
Giving up on this is like giving up on her, you know.
She does know. The thought usually inspires somewhere around 2.7 seconds of sword-extruding effort.
It's something like funny that dedicating a sword to her prince makes it take almost twice as long to pull out.
She doesn't know how long it took to stop the echoes of her name—the last thing she thought to tell her, as if she needed reminding—to stop shivering along the metal sticking through her throat. She waits until the sound has left to pluck out those.
Often, she wonders what's become of her prince and her 287 missing swords: how many she has left in her, what condition she and they are in.
There's an obvious answer, a very distinct possibility of what that condition might be, that she refuses to consider. An eminently predictable result of being stabbed 288 times that she dismisses out of hand. They're not really princes or witches. Neither of them were pierced by real swords. It's not that serious.
And yet her finger can barely twitch for all the metal in it.