Page 6 of Of Sockets Of Stitches (Unworldly City #4)

Chapter Six

Five powers grasp

All icy demise

Free from her olden prison.

W hat I knew and understood was that the creature rested its head on my lap. I could feel my lap and my hands that stroked the creature’s soft fur.

There was no mange nor scar, so the tiny suspicion that this creature was a werebeast version of King Change dissipated.

The creature was ancient designed—either ancient or the physical manifestation of my inner turmoil.

Or the creature was the sensations of my body, for I could see now that I had always, since four, placed far more importance on the physical knowledge and needs of my body—food, shelter, physical pain, lust. I had done that to avoid sinking into the parts of me that were fractured.

A broken queen indeed .

No longer.

She was unafraid. Unafraid of almost anything. She was unafraid of seeing him again, because she had learned that the love of monsters was her salvation and reason. The love of monsters had saved her and been in her heart always.

In the love of monsters, she would always hope and care and dream.

I did not fear meeting King See again.

I did fear never returning to my monsters.

I patted the creature, and then paused when it retreated from me and stood on all fours. This cannot be My End, after all that.

The creature licked my face. My eyelids. They were closed. I had not known. I had ceased to remember that I had eyes at all. Eyes for looking?

I opened them.

The fog hardly helped my ability to find and focus on the single irregularity in the haze, and at first there was no making sense of the blur.

There was an interruption, though.

I focused on the thin crevice in the haze. A path?

The creature loomed over me. Her fur was a rich copper hue. Her fangs were white and terrible and they dripped with saliva and threat. Powerful. Capable of ripping a queen in two. Yet now more than ever, I got the sense she might be me.

Sanity? Guardian? Self? Body?

Some connections were bigger than a queen. This was one of them. I contented myself with the idea that I may never know. But I could still feel grateful to a creature who had snapped and snarled and growled until I looked inward.

“Thank you,” I said, and I heard my voice.

My voice! Husky, raw, and unused.

The creature turned and padded to the thin path, and I staggered upright, able to feel my body but very faintly. In fact, the further the creature moved from me, the weaker all of my senses became.

I could run to the creature to regain the bodily sensations of me, but I had found my inner peace and healed my forever pains. There was a reluctance to disturb the new calm of my minds with the distractions of body.

The creature turned to watch me, and when I did not run to touch its soft fur, she swung her head to the tiny path.

The path widened.

The creature walked ahead.

I followed.

This is how we return . They celebrated with me, the woman swinging the child around in circles, the orb cushioned between their chests. Safe.

I walked after the creature and did not quicken my footsteps when she disappeared ahead. The path grew wider and more defined by the passing of time and the healing of me.

The tiny crevice had become a walkway between two seas of fog.

This path leads to our monsters.

Yet I should not feel so sure of ancient design. Ahead, the fog was not as thick. More of a mist that swirled and allowed tiny glimpses of what lay ahead.

Ah.

But of course. I had forgotten my small problem.

He lay on the cracked, hard dirt ground—a king whose circumstances had vastly changed .

My lips curved at the small amusement.

King Change.

I must have spoken, for how he leaped. From despairing and unmoving to sitting and scowling.

I walked to sit beside him, and the creature appeared through the fog to curl at my feet .

Change’s scarred and pitted lips had been moving, and when the creature touched my skin, I was able to hear.

“—did you find me?” he demanded. “What is that beast?”

I stared into the fog. I was unused to hearing much of anything, and unused to answering even myself, let alone another monster.

I stared into the fog and considered King Change.

He, who had shoved a vial with the last drops of a deadly curse into my back to weaken or kill me.

He, who had never believed in the beauty of my monsters, but only in the evil of them.

This king had rushed to my mother’s grave in a desperate attempt to ensure lasting ruin on the world.

Perhaps he had found his own...

I considered the king, who continued to demand any number of answers. I switched off my hearing. Change had wandered through the haze. He had stopped wandering. He clearly had not been deprived of his bodily senses if he could hear and see me and the creature.

Had he sat with his broken self?

What love could be had by all if King Change had… changed. My lips curved again.

“What thoughts have occupied you in the haze, sir?” I thought, quite forgetting to use my mouth. Nevertheless, my thought was taken up by the fog, and the fog lent my words an echoing quality that seemed to steal away the king’s breath.

His brutalized face slackened. “My… thoughts.”

I spoke aloud this time. “Your thoughts on the evilness of monsters. In this haze that robs us of all excuses and denials and lies, what have become your thoughts on the evil of monsters?”

His face twisted. He looked away.

If not for being alone and in despair for so long, perhaps the king would have ignored my question, and yet he had been very afraid of his immortality before I arrived.

“In this haze, I have walked for the ruin of monsters when no other thought of princess, or revenge, or disloyal prince remained.”

I allowed the disappointment his words inspired to wash over me. My hopes and dreams and cares were unaltered by the feeling, but I could feel saddened that King Change—at his core and center and soul—would never believe in anything other than the end of monsters.

Love of monsters had been my reason to walk. Ruin of monsters, his.

If the haze could not alter him, he would never alter.

“You are admirable, sir,” I said, and received his suspicious glare.

“I wish humanity and monsterdom had served you better. I admire your persistence and originality and knowledge. I had expected that deep down you did not really believe in ruin, but you did, as you said. To know yourself that well is admirable. And to accept yourself and declare your unpopular beliefs before others is exceptional too.”

“You speak nonsense,” he snapped, glancing away.

King Change knew that I spoke utter sense.

“If you are here to end my existence, then why do you do nothing but stare into the blackness?” he roared, then surged to his feet.

But blackness? We did not all see the same haze, apparently.

I had been staring, but I had been unused to seeing lately.

Seeing was a lot to integrate again, especially when I did not wish to lose the new connection to my calm thoughts and self.

My body could not be as important as it had always been, so I had to take care with how loudly my senses returned.

He shouted, “Again, you stare and do nothing.”

Goodness, he was undone.

If I had not been staring, though, I might not have glimpsed a tiny crevice in the fog. Another path.

I smiled. “The way clears. Follow me, King of No Change.”

Even growling, he followed me. Of course he did. What other choice did he have besides remaining everlost in the blackness of his haze?

I had no choice to leave him, really, not when the path back to my monsters had led me to him so clearly.

King Change was needed in the vibrant world of monsters, whether he liked it or not. Whether I liked it or not, King Change must return.