Page 3 of Of Sockets Of Stitches (Unworldly City #4)

Chapter Three

The clamor of truth.

M onsters need me.

Since entering this place and envisioning the rocky slope that I had clambered up, I had imagined myself sitting. Now I imagined myself lying down, cheek pressing against a jagged rock that I could not feel but which drew blood and bruise.

I was cut off from body, and I mourned for its distraction.

The creature was here again. Close. I did not care.

The clamor of my minds are too great, I thought at it.

The creature launched forward, jaws snapping. I did not move as he started to stalk a tight ring around me. Not close enough for me to touch, but not much farther.

Ah, this is My End.

The creature snapped its jaws again, yet I was but a stuttering heartbeat now. Weariness had been left behind, and I existed in an abyss but for the creature’s interference .

I could do without his presence. Then the abyss would be complete.

Do it, I whispered.

The creature’s growl cocooned me—a warning.

I screamed in mind and power at him. Do it!

My throat surely ripped raw with the force of my pain. Do it! Take it away, or be gone with you!

I could not keep up the energy of such raw emotions, so I slumped deeper into eternal depths. So deep, the thought of rising to the surface again was unfathomable. How could anyone make this better?

The creature’s growl faded. Good, maybe he had decided to leave me alone forevermore.

How could I ever make myself better?

His growling stopped.

Here, so drained in self, I hit the rock bottom of my abyss. Shock rippled through me when I realized that I was not alone.

She stood before my very eyes. And she was me. I knew her as myself.

My soul?

The woman was a trembling wraith, curled in upon herself and dressed in rags. Bruises peppered her back and shoulders, and her bones jutted. She was an abused creature.

How was she me?

In my shock, a thought arose, a mere wisp to carefully inhale.

Has she always been me?

Yes—the answer rippled through the abyss surrounding us. Another wisp arose.

How have I hidden her from… myself?

How had she existed like this without my knowledge?

My power and mind wept, no resistance in me, for here was the truth. At the bottom of my rock bottoms, here was me. This abused creature that I had hidden away. Only in exhaustion and torture and robbed of bodily senses had I been forced to reveal her.

I had spoken such words of kindness to myself, fearing that another could break me.

But King See was right all along. I was already broken.

And I had dressed my injured, trembling soul in patch and stitch to ignore her pain and frailness so that I could deny her existence.

My soul wept for being seen and found. She wept and wept.

And the last wisp arose.

A queen cannot champion monsters if she cannot champion herself.

I had been the greatest fool.