Page 86 of Of Monsters Of Kings

Only the west remained. In that direction, and off in the distance, I found the eerie, enormous trees of Change’s sparse forest. No moonlight touched his kingdom, only shadow. I imagined the uniform and barren trees looked exquisite in such a setting.

“But there are five kingdoms,” I mused. I’d completed a lap of my conservatory and only found four.

I returned to the center and stared at the burgundy drape. Was that the answer? Was the fifth kingdom behind the drape? I wasn’t ready to take the risk in case a mirror sat behind the curtain. King Change had shown me that how we felt inside could convince us to think and act in horrible ways, and I was determined to better prepare for meeting my monsters.

I looked directly up, but mere stars twinkled back at me through the round glass panel above. No sky kingdom floated in sight.

I stared at my booted feet on the lush floor. “Does thyme reveal all things, I wonder?”

I couldn’t imagine the fifth kingdom existed under the floor, but I should cover all possibilities. I stomped through the conservatory, swishing my boots through the thyme, and when I reached the exact center, a hollow sound rewarded my efforts. I’d walked over this spot numerous times and had never heard a hidden hollowness, but perhaps it just appeared.

Lowering to my hands and knees, I scraped thyme away to reveal a dusty, glass panel beneath. I closed one eye to focus through a tiny clear patch in the dust.

A great eye peered back at me.

I shouted and reeled away, falling on my behind. Sprawled in thyme, I grinned at the night sky, feeling the rapidness of my heart and the coiled fright in my body. Ha! I’d been foggy with the last dregs of slumber, but this playful someone had helped me to fully wake.

When I crawled to the panel, my heart sank to find the person gone. And without a hello or exchange of names. How disappointing!

With the peeping person out of the way, though, I could see everything on the other side, and a gasp fell from my lips.

A great tunnel drilled downward into the Earth. Rings circled the tunnel walls at intervals. The nearest rings signaled where the floors of my hotel each sat. Past them was a thick ring that I expected was Earth’s surface—the ground that Vitale citizens walked upon. Instead of ending there, thousands of stairwells crisscrossed beyond as far as my monstrous eyes could see. A kingdom existed beneath Vitale, and this kingdom was one of stairs—stairs to everywhere, a veritable maze I couldn’t hope to make sense of.

Where did the stairwells lead? Whyever would a person have so many stairs in their house? How did they keep track of so many beginnings and ends?

Magnificent indeed.

I plonked on my behind again. Did King Raise live in the thatched house raised impossibly high off the ground? Or did he live in a kingdom of stairs that raised him in every direction? I couldn’t guess. I couldn’t guess which kingdom might belong to King Bring, either, so the solution was to pick one kingdom and solve the mystery.

The stairwells enticed and frightened. I could get lost there for eternity. Yet I couldn’t imagine climbing the rocky pedestal to reach the thatched house. I’d never climbed so high in my life, and such a climb could take days or weeks.

I descended to the courtyard and stopped short at the sight of a princely werebeast.

“Prince Huckery,” I blurted. “Is it that time already? I quite missed the coming of my stitches. Good evening.”

“Is it?” he challenged, snarling after.

I glanced around. “As good as any.”

The prince raised his hackles. “What’s your game?”

Trust didn’t come easily to this monster. “Would you believe I had no game?”

“No, because humans are not believable, and I’m not convinced you’re a monster.”

I held out my stitched-on hands to show him. “What’s unconvincing about my monsterdom?”

“You’re just not monstrous enough.” He paced in front of the wall of bars.

I almost felt offended, and that brought a smile to my twisted lips. I would only feel offended by an insult, so clearly I considered lack of monsterdom to be an insult. “Prince Huckery, thank you. You’ve made me realize I want to be considered a monster and not human. That is a fresh insight indeed. You see, I quickly learned that monsters are more interesting than humans, but now I must wish to be interesting more than I wish to be conventional in looks. How unexpected.”

He appeared surprised. “You found humans interesting at one time?”

“Not much, but I was one until the monster process triggered in me, so they were my standard for normality. Though I always found them conventional and…”

“Bland?” he supplied.

“Bland. That’s a good word. Humans were normal to me, but not intriguing. The humans in my life seemed to find one another very intriguing, too, and I could never figure out why. Perhaps then I was always a bit monster. But with your help, I’ve seen that monsterdom is my new normal and not unusual in the slightest. Which is very good as I’d prefer to be interesting and not bland if I have a choice.”

---