Page 26 of Of Sockets Of Stitches
And a queen was left with five kings.
I floated a circle around the olden rock and considered smaller kingdoms, all of them shrunken to reflect the change in power.
A queen must save the world… and princesses had sparked deeper thought within me. If the lips of kings moved and spoke, then I did not reply. Indeed, I forgot them altogether in my circling. I might as well have walked in the other version of this conservatory that existed in the barren world atop a tower, for no one else existed.
How.
Why.
Why did the world begin its slide to ruin?I stopped, and did not immediately register that I had stopped before the seeing king.
Yet here was the irritating truth: Fifty mothers would not fathom The End of the world, for they were human—though they had all led ancient-touched human lives. Princes and most princesses had been born as monsters. All but Princess Bring, who did not possess the ability of powerful and ancient connection, even if she had been more than a baby.
Five others had once walked as humans before warping toimmortality. They were powerful in connection. One above all possessed the ability to see past, present, and future, except in matters pertaining to me.
But The End of the world had occurred far before my coming.
This was the irritating truth. Only one monster could answer my question, and I would rather not ask him for any answer.
I looked into King See’s milky gaze. He did not know what to do with my proximity. I felt the unrest of him. I felt that my body called to him still. I felt his distance too. We were not the same as we had once been. He had ensured that.
A queen must not fail in pride and vanity as King Bring had. King See was a wealth of unique power and information and experience. I must wield that for the existence of humans and monsters.
King See warred within himself for control, and I watched until he eventually reclaimed it. Icy chilliness emanated from him after.
I had not thought or spoken aloud. “Why did the world begin its slide to ruin, Seeing King? To save the world, I must understand the origins of its demise.”
King See inhaled at my quiet question, or more likely at the powerful music of my voice. The tiniest spark glinted in his cold eyes before dying again. The tiny spark reminded me of a tiny path that had formed in the haze. The tiny spark begged me to follow it.
I did not. “The answer resides with humans. It must, as monsters came after The End, and likely because of it. Assumedly ancients arrived before The End in answer to the world’s dire state. What has the king of seeing connected about the reason for the world’s end?”
The fullness of me, and so close, was wreaking havoc on hisfocus. His breath came fast. His pupils were dilated. Our heartbeats rocketed together.
And he did his best to freeze everything he felt.
As for myself, I existed above the clouds, and so the clouds of him could float beneath me and not affect me.
I waited.
King See gathered his thoughts. “You would trust the answer of a king who sought to steal your throne?”
My lips torsioned. “What has trust to do with your answer? Your past decisions have altered future paths, but not the path where you are shackled as a servant of my queendom. Your purpose here is to advise me whenever I might seek advice.”
Instead of entering a rage, the tiny spark reappeared in his gaze. This time, the spark lingered a while.
“Waste a queen’s time at the peril of monsters,” I said, and my queendom squeezed and shook.
King See straightened in his shackles, and I was annoyed to discover that I had forgotten he wore them. He did not seem as weighed by them as the others. He wove the illusion of being able to step away from the shackles at any moment. Perhaps I should add a few more to his panel.
He said, “The answer rests with humans, as you connected. Humans, themselves, made half of the connection as to what transpired to cause the dawn of the new age. They had raped the world, and the world returned the favor. Yet that was only half, or rather less so, of the truth. The disease was within humans, too, and still is. So while they have not raped the world in centuries, the world remains so very sick. Humans’ monstrous power is their parasitic presence. For they are so infused through all facets of nature and the world, that if they die, then they drag all of everything into death with them.”
My gaze darted between See’s milky eyes, for he had put my warning instincts into words. Humans were the skull, and a body should not exist decapitated. Humans could not die, andhere was the reason. Humans had woven their way into us and everything, and now our fates were linked. Incredible and monstrous power indeed. Their failings had become our fate, and so our failings to undo.
As for the nature of their disease, their failing was as it had ever and always been. One fatal flaw rested at the heart of humanity.
“Convention,” I stated for the benefit of other kings.
The reason for interference of ancients.
