Page 131 of Of Sockets Of Stitches
Her warmth radiated out.
And though I knew that black evil battered at her with all its might, I could only hear the muffled sounds of her plight.
Because the battle of my mother was as unique as all other battles before hers.
Fifty mothers knew that kings could not win, and so they had made me, and the fiftieth daughter had walked into the toothed beast’s yawn.
But though the histories of monsters may claim differently, the daughter knew the truth of matters.
She knew that a queen would never have conquered ruin without the women who had gone before her.
My chest was arched forward by a sharp tug from Mother’s candlelight. See grunted in my ear, dragged with me in answer to a twin tugging on him.
I gasped as Mother yanked, and that intangiblethingshared between my prince and I was wrenched out of us.
A heart.
Just one—the heart we shared. Thebeautyof it,like glass and diamond. A mineral unknown. Impossible with all its angles that caught at the candlelight to reflect and refract it in trillions of directions. An amplifier, the candlelight was suddenly undeniable when shone through our shared heart.
So many lights from everywhere, all different speeds and directions. And this is how mothers used monsters to crush ruin. Here at last was the experience of what other monsters had gone through. Through the force of our various unions and romances, the power of fifty mothers became near infinite.Amplifiers, indeed.
Our shared heart hovered above the candle, and its flame was eternal.
No fear remained in me, whether this would be our end or otherwise. I leaned back onto See, and he tightened his hold around me.
And, as we’d always done in monsterdom.
We awaited our fate.
Epilogue
In matters of her prince,
her monsters
her queendom
A queen hoped to never believe in immortality.
Humans screamed and cried and begged. Rags barely covered them, but mud and sand surely did.
Such was a saved world. From all accounts, the humans appeared to very much like not washing very often, having released their convention of dressing a certain way for others.
We had pulled them from their caves and sand huts and rooftops for this haunt, though some did still dwell in the luxury of apartments, obeying their more gluttonous and sloth vices. Most humans appeared to crave a connection with nature, though aside from that uniting factor, not much else connected them other than that they were human.
Some liked no hair.
Some liked as much hair as possible.
Some like to wear mud on their bodies, while others liked foliage. Some humans snarled and some danced. Some hugged, and some spurned other company.
Some mothered and some led.
All in all, humans were rather monstrous these dusks, ten years after The Real Beginning. More and more, humans freed the exquisiteness of their potential. In another ten years, I could only imagine what wonderful hunches and slimes and extra limbs that may emerge. Humans were powerful, after all, in their own monstrous way. Too ruinous before, but the world had not known how to fight back.
A queen had not always existed, and we had not known exactly how to fix their conventional tendencies.
I watched my pawns terrorize the humans, and then clapped my hands as to cheer on simple monsters doing their worst.
