They found shelter in the lee of a monolithic slab of black rock that had been thrust up by the Pulse, a temporary shield against the oppressive strangeness of the world. A fragile, exhausted quiet settled over them. They were a family of ghosts, haunted by houses that shouldn't exist and markets that shouldn't be real. Ira sat with his back against the stone, his eyes open but seeing nothing, a man hollowed out by memory and its absence. Sera watched the horizon, her vigilance a silent, tireless vigil.
Lio tried to rest, but sleep was a country whose borders were closed to him. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the empty space in the painting, a void shaped exactly like his sister.
It was the rustling of parchment that drew his attention. Ira, moving with the slow, dreamlike movements that now characterized him, had opened his satchel. His hands, acting on a muscle memory deeper than conscious thought, retrieved a map. It was the one Lio knew best, the one he had seen his father weep over: a detailed chart of their home island, a drawing of a world that was now just a memory in the sea. Ira unrolled it on his lap, not to navigate, but to touch a relic of his former life. He stared down at the familiar lines and names, a king gazing upon his lost, shrunken kingdom.
That's when the first drop appeared.
It materialized on the parchment as if from nowhere, a single, perfect, glistening bead of dark red. It blossomed right over the spot where their village, and their house, had been marked. For a moment, Lio thought it was a raindrop filtering through a crack in the rock above.
Ira stared at it, his brow furrowed in a flicker of mild confusion. He lifted a finger to wipe it away, thinking perhaps he'd cut himself without realizing. He touched the droplet. It didn't wipe away. It smeared. The substance was thicker than water, stickier than ink. The color was the deep, obscene crimson of old blood.
Then another drop appeared, and another. A thin, red tributary branched off from one of the neatly drawn blue rivers, turning it into a grotesque, bifurcated vein. More red lines began to spiderweb across the parchment, tracing coastlines and elevation markers. The elegant black ink that formed the familiar place names began to ooze and run, bleeding a thick, blackish red fluid that smelled faintly of salt and rust.
The map was hemorrhaging.
"No," Ira whispered, the sound a pained, horrified gasp. It was the sound of a man watching a beloved child suffer. The sight had pierced through his catatonia, but what it revealed was not anger or fear, but a deep, instinctual agony. He frantically tried to staunch the flow with the palm of his hand, pressing down on the weeping parchment. The blood ink oozed between his fingers, staining his skin. "Shh, shh, now," he murmured to the map, his voice gentle and breaking. "It's alright. It's alright."
Lio watched, frozen in visceral horror. He had seen the map rewrite itself, a clean, sterile kind of magic. This was different. This was biological. This was body horror. It was like watching a living thing bleed out on his father's lap.
"Ira, let it go!" Sera's voice was sharp, cutting through the grotesque scene. She scrambled over to him, her face etched with grim urgency. "Leave it. It's sick. You can't help it."
Her words—it's sick—implied a terrible familiarity, as if this were a known and fatal disease for these living artifacts.
Ira ignored her, his full attention on the dying map, his hands now slick with the dark fluid. He looked like a battlefield medic trying to save a mortally wounded soldier.
Mina, drawn by the commotion, approached the scene. She looked at the bleeding map not with horror, but with a child's solemn curiosity. She reached out a small, hesitant finger toward one of the weeping blackish red lines.
"Mina, get back!" Lio choked out.
She paid him no mind, her finger hovering just over the slick surface. She looked up from the map to her father's anguished face.
"You can't fix it, Papa," she said, her voice soft and clear. "It's alive." She looked back at the ruined, bleeding chart. "It's just having a bad dream."
Her simple, terrible pronouncement hung in the air. Lio stared at the scene—his father, cradling a bleeding piece of paper as if it were his child; his mother, trying to pull him from his grief; and his sister, the calm interpreter of a world where everything was alive, and everything could feel pain. The family's last artifact of a stable, charted reality was dying a slow, visceral death in their hands.