Page 14 of Of Sockets Of Stitches
The creature stalked ahead to yet another tiny path.
I held no expectations that this would be the last stop. Expectations bred disappointment, after all. Yet not so long evaporated before the creature brushed against my side once more.
King Change let out an almighty yell, and the ground shook as he crashed to meet it.
I glanced back to find the changing king ready to attack. His instincts were commendable, for he had tripped over someone’s arm, and he had assumed—as most would—that the arm was attached to a person.
He was incorrect.
“Calm, sir. ’Tis but an amputated arm from one of my mothers.”
King Change spluttered, “C-calm? Over a severedarm?”
I enjoyed a rhyme as much as the next monster, but this moment demanded my full attention. “Once upon a dusk, the creature who stalks beside me nearly tore the arm off one of my mothers. I amputated her arm and tossed it into this haze as a challenge to the creature. I had already fathomed that one day we would meet, and I quite misunderstood her purpose back then.”
I would not misunderstand her again. The path had led me to the very arm of a mother.
The dead flesh of a mother.
The fingers twitched, and King Change surged upward with somewhat of a yelp to put distance between himself and the twitching arm.
Notdead.
Or granted life in death, like my fifty mothers. Though I should say forty-nine, for one of my mothers was forever dead. Adalina had died forever when a deadly curse was dripped onto the stitch shackling King Change in place. The stitch had died, and so had the mother who had stitched it.
King Change had just tripped over this arm, which should be dead but was somehow alive. Meanwhile, Adalina should be alive, but was dead.
Two sides of the same coin.
Picking up the arm whilst also cradling the baby princess was not easy, but I did so, then scanned the fog for any sign of path. Power, mind, and body were robbed from me at the unexpected sight of a queenly tower.
Myqueenly tower.
The haze had split in two, like an ocean, and the grayscale world it had shrouded was revealed again. The rocky, dirt ground.
My tower.
Forty-nine mothers sitting in vigil, and the fiftieth—Adalina—flat on her back indeath.
Mymother sat beside her hellebore grave, and my heart leaped into my throat and filled my mouth so.Suchfeeling to return when I had not even wished to upon entering the haze, and then after never expected to.
And then hoped.
Hopes and dreams. They had triumphed. Theycouldtriumph.
The faint tendrils of my mothers’ chant reached my powerful ears, but the savage snarl of the creature sitting beside me overrode them.
King Change was running toward the queenly tower, I realized.Fool.He could not leave here without my permission, not now that the circle of my mothers was complete.
I tried to step after him, and the creature snapped at my boots. Drawing my foot back, I considered her: russet fur—so like copper—savage fangs, and so much violent potential. This creature represented part of me. My body, specifically.
This creature was ancient designed. And… I supposed that my body was the same. Had not ancients filled Cassandra, the first of my mothers, with their purpose to drive her to make a bargain with King Raise? That bargain had led to my bodily creation of stitches and patches.
I lifted the amputated arm, and the creature’s gaze tracked the movement.
Ah.
Butah.
