Page 5 of Of Sockets Of Stitches
The creature’s growl cocooned me—a warning.
I screamed in mind and power at him.Do it!
My throat surely ripped raw with the force of my pain.Do it!Take it away, or be gone with you!
I could not keep up the energy of such raw emotions, so I slumped deeper into eternal depths. So deep, the thought of rising to the surface again was unfathomable.How could anyone make this better?
The creature’s growl faded. Good, maybe he had decided to leave me alone forevermore.
How could I ever make myself better?
His growling stopped.
Here, so drained in self, I hit the rock bottom of my abyss. Shock rippled through me when I realized that I was not alone.
She stood before my very eyes. And she was me. I knew her as myself.
My soul?
The woman was a trembling wraith, curled in upon herself and dressed in rags. Bruises peppered her back and shoulders, and her bones jutted. She was an abused creature.
How was she me?
In my shock, a thought arose, a mere wisp to carefully inhale.
Has she always been me?
Yes—the answer rippled through the abyss surrounding us. Another wisp arose.
How have I hidden her from… myself?
How had she existed like this without my knowledge?
My power and mind wept, no resistance in me, for here was the truth. At the bottom of my rock bottoms, here was me. This abused creature that I had hidden away. Only in exhaustion andtorture and robbed of bodily senses had I been forced to reveal her.
I had spoken such words of kindness to myself, fearing that another could break me.
But King See was right all along. Iwasalready broken.
And I had dressed my injured, trembling soul in patch and stitch to ignore her pain and frailness so that I could deny her existence.
My soul wept for being seen and found. She wept and wept.
And the last wisp arose.
A queen cannot champion monsters if she cannot champion herself.
I had been the greatest fool.
Chapter Four
The luxury of time.
The death of trust.
The clamor of truth.
Silence.
