Page 44 of Of Sockets Of Stitches (Unworldly City #4)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Hope is a creature of horror.

H ope was a terrible force, more haunting than the most haunting haunt of a monster.

I had not dared to hope after first connecting how I must heal the injuries of the world. I dared to hope tonight. In fact, I could not quash the hope in me.

How horrible hope was. To think that another frayed seam might shortly mend. To think that we might shuffle one step closer to saving.

Might .

Here was another word to haunt me.

The “might” of healing was a stench in the air as champions gathered around me to depart through a hellebore grave. Those remaining behind hovered and lingered too close. In uncertainty. In survival instinct.

Though the Brings felt none of that. They stood together, blobs held high and sure. They stood with the confidence of an immortality shared. Their love was a love cultivated through overcoming hardships together and in respect for each other.

They also had not heard my mother’s warning of might.

Which meant that I might feel their confidence if I had not heard either. I turned down the memory of Mother’s words and enjoyed the rush of determination that resulted.

Much better.

The mood of my lingering monsters brightened in tandem with their queen’s.

“Champions, we depart,” I growled in a voice saturated in madness.

Hellebores rustled at my approach.

“Perantiqua,” called See.

I battled against madness to look back. “Prince Consort?”

See strode toward me, Life walking beside him.

The prince consort stopped before me and bowed. “ Might I suggest that you ride Life to the seam, my queen?”

Might.

I wrinkled my nose at the purposeful word. “Could it be that a seeing monster is warning a queen at last?”

See bowed, and when he straightened, I saw grim seriousness in his gaze.

He replied, “Sometimes he cannot. Sometimes he will not. Sometimes he can.”

Life lowered so I could mount. His savage splinters never seemed to pierce my skin.

“Thank you for the times you can,” I told See. Then I rasped to Life in madness, “Fly faster than the wind, dear Life!”

The steed blurred me through hellebores and erupted into the sky. The screams and cries of clamoring humans and the low groans of minions were quickly left behind.

We did not have far to travel.

I had rarely ventured far from the walls of Vitale, mostly to heal seams, really. But I had visited the cave that had contained the olden rock more than once.

If only I had wandered a time beyond, then I would have glimpsed the black sands that extended outward for so long that a monster could only despair at the sight.

I floated atop Life in the air above and my champions arrived in a whoosh and cackle with the earl in tow.

“My queen!” shouted Princess Change.

I whipped my head to peer downward and sucked in a breath at the furious rise of black granules. They were forming into shards of ice, splinters of diamond, daggers meant to slice and maim and destroy. “Ruin knows we’re here.”

Champions scrambled to link hands and set their hands on the earl. The world exploded in a roar and bellow of trillions of grains of sand pelting and stabbing against their barrier.

If Life had lowered by an inch, sickness would have taken his hooves.

So close to touching me and claiming me.

There was a reason that a queen’s power had no effect against this sickness. Because that was fair. This infection must have a chance to succeed, too, by eliminating the heart of monsters.

Too close.

I dove into the stitch connecting my left arm to my torso.

“Madison,” I echoed a call.

In my mind’s eye, or in the curious undead layer that superimposed over life, Madison stood. She kissed her mother, Molly, who was weeping and tugging at her stitches to be free.

Madison was a healer of a mother’s heart. Only her presence in the circle had calmed her mother’s attempt to be free.

Peace of soul.

Madison was a balm as strong but as unique as Adalina had been.

For while Adalina had affected large masses with everything kind and good, Madison could sense a hurt soul in the darkness.

She targeted them without conscious thought, and though kind and good, Madison’s power was in the lending of her strength.

She had such wondrous excess of inner strength, and also an unconscious generosity of lending that quality to select others whose souls were most in turmoil.

“Mother, I am in awe of you. Such pride resonates in me because you are my ancestor.”

Madison placed a hand on my shoulder. She gripped it in a way that grounded all my uncertainties as if they were a flock of birds who had suddenly and unexpectedly decided against erupting into flight.

“Pride. Awe. I feel all of these things for the chapters of you, Daughter. I go to the final death with such intrigue of all that remains unwritten for you. Write it well, as only you can.”

“I will, Mother,” I said hoarsely.

She did not wipe away my tears, for such tears were her definition of strength.

I was pulled out of my mind and back to the world of monsters as Madison’s stitch unwound from my left shoulder. She hovered before me, as the others had done, and I could not blink for the watching of her transformation.

Not shield, nor giant, nor snake, nor herself.

And though she was everything good and generous, she was those things in great excess of strength.

The stitch ricocheted outward in a sweeping boom and blast and shimmering. The translucent substance she had formed swirled.

Madison was a wind, a gale.

The crucial second ingredient to whip a sandstorm into being. The barrier of champions dropped and Madison circled through the slicing granules in enormous circles to gather the sand in her slipstream.

Champions settled into the second phase of their power and purpose, that of aiding the mother in her battle. They clawed at the black sands below, whisking them upward and into the growing sandstorm until the sky and land were black all around.

Madison was out there, so formidable and unafraid. My champions must be close. All of them protected me as surely as they attacked.

The sky grew lighter, and I scanned until locating my champions. The Brings were separating from the others and walking toward a Madison that they could clearly see, though I could not make any sense of this chaos.

But there! A shimmer in the air, an echoing encouragement from a mother who was a tower of strength in life, in undead life, and in her final battle.

The Brings were taken by sand. If they screamed, then I could not hear above the gale and pounding roar.

The sandstorm was being forced to the ground. The sky was steadily reclaimed.

Until it stopped.

With no sight of Madison or the Brings, though surely they fought from within, the sickness stopped shrinking.

A standstill. Yet ruin would not stand still for long.

“Champions,” I shouted.

I wrenched my gaze from the black for precious seconds to see the sweat dripping from their brows. My heart stopped altogether as Princess Change toppled in a dead faint from the sky. Her, and then my marchioness, and lastly my duke.

No.

My gaze was forced back by pending doom to the black grains of sand remaining. There was a glee to the dance of the sickness as it sensed a queen undefended and powerless to protect herself.

I could run, I supposed. Forever.

Yet this seam was only mostly healed, so I could not run. Because I loved monsters most of all .

Life shook his tasseled mane, snorting. In slow shock, I dragged my focus to my steed.

“Life?” I whispered as the black sand formed shards and splinters and daggers. “Life, I am sorry.”

The mount snorted again, as if in derision. He, my first unwelcome and then cherished gift from my mother.

Life cantered forward in a blur, charging down the center of the sands’ attack. I cried out as his splinters were sliced off by the enemy. His tassels were cut to stubs by dagger. I screamed against my hand as shard and splinter did their best to stop him.

Life disappeared in the sickness far below.

And I screamed, then, for the sands of black had finally reached a queen. The grains ate away at my skin, and the muscle beneath. They wished to reach my mind, and soul, and power.

My jaw locked in endless scream, in fear of an immortality as ruin’s slave.

And as the black started to once against shrink, to shrink into nothing because of the sacrifice of a steed and a mother, I was lost to the victory.

Because darkness had found me.

Here was The End.

The Real End.