Chapter 424: The Melancholy Queen
Isabel began explaining softly, "It's like a canvas with only a rough outline sketched on it. Or like a piece of music with a beat, but missing its theme."
"Whether inside or outside the outline, there is only that 'blankness' where nothing has been drawn yet. I know there are still so many gaps, but I don't even know how to begin filling them in."
"...That's quite an artistic answer."
Iver commented, "It sounds like something you would say."
But it's surprisingly apt, he thought.
Isabel gently closed her eyes. Sitting upright, she recalled softly, "Those cities had no opera houses, no commercial centers, no museums, and no universities. No Alchemy Shops, no towering buildings like Lloyd's. There were no places like Round Table Hall for meetings, and the municipal centers weren't even as large as the villa you gave me.
"Most cities had only one library, and some had none, because many people couldn't read. Two-thirds of the cities had no paved roads. There were only a few local newspapers, and some places couldn't even buy the Glass Staircase Newspaper. A town had at most three churches, and when people fell ill, they could only go to the hospital—yet there were barely any decent hospitals at all.
"Many prisons were overcrowded, and some even had walls that let in the wind. Prisoners would starve or freeze to death inside them. In some cities, people who had been hanged would remain dangling for a month or two because no one came to take them down. They had no family left.
"On Glass Island, underage workers had to be at least fourteen years old, and even the harshest factories worked them for no more than twelve hours a day. But in some cities west of Avalon,