Page 125 of Of Skulls Of Shackles

My heart started to pound, and the tightness of my patches was echoed inside.Brittle.I could not let him glimpse the weakness of me. Not until I knew if this was all just a simple heartbreak. How ironic to now wish for that fate. “How exactly is a queen broken?”

“Because the girl who became queen could not save her mother, not even in her mother’s death.”

I staggered back a step as pain exploded in the deepest parts of me, in my soul. I could not immediately speak through it. “That is not the breaking of me but themaking.”

“You are ever the girl hiding in the elevator scared that the landlady will discover you. Why else do you return to haunt her so? ’Tis not the landlady you seek to haunt but yourself.”

My chest rose and fell. He was not right. He was not! “You do not know me better than myself.”

“I have explored more of you than you ever have,” he snarled, then smirked. “Or have you buried your fingers in your ass?”

The words were a dark disrespect of the perfect love we had created and shared. See had been many things to me, but disrespectful? Never. “You are not yourself. You are adjusting to new power. We must pause in this conversation before real damage is done.”

The damage was done. There was a fractured change in the air between us. But I had to heed the warning of mothers or they would tear me apart.

“I am exactly myself,” he roared.

Not mild as he tended to be in a rage. He hadroared.See was uncovered. His real ambitions and obsession to rise as my adversary.

How could ancients be so cruel? They surely could not be so cruel.

Yet King See had failed me far more times than he had helped me.Whydid I put such faith in him? When had See earned that apart from in the infancy of my monsterdom?

For the first time, I saw that my ability to consider so many things at once was not entirely a strength, for I created one hundred theories in the next instant, and not half of them worked in See’s loving favor, but in favor of his long-held plot to overthrow me instead.

He tilted his head. “You start to fathom the whole. Ploy though heartbreak was, I see that I have achieved such breaking after all. Your face and body crumble with it.” He chuckled. “Such small amusements in immortality. But worry not, you will adjust to our new fate.”

I took two unsteady steps closer to him and to the grave between us. “Youwantme to feel like there is a whole. You wish to undo me.”

“Yes,” See hissed. “I wish to undo and remake you as you should be.”

“You would not do that to me? But you…”

“Love you?” he asked. “So many months spent telling you that I would never love you, yet I knew that my success depended on burying my cock in you. There was vast power to be had through claiming the virginity of a queen. I had never thought you pitiful until you begged in so many ways to hear that I loved you. Another instance where you did not look beyond the words offered to you to the lie beyond.”

His words were daggers that picked at each of my stitches. His tone was more poisonous than the poison capable of killing immortals. For I might live through this night, but I would never recover from his comments. “See, you must stop.”

“I will not stop.”

I said louder, “There is nothing to gain from this!”

“There iseverythingto gain from this.”

I thumped my chest and screamed wordlessly, then shouted, “I cannot believe you, for our hearts beat together. You cannot convince me that our fate is anything other than shared. We can never be adversaries. Every word you speak is a lie. An impossible lie!”

He walked away a few steps, but the uncaring casualness of his posture spoke volumes. “Our fate is shared, but our destiny was never set. For a long time, I believed monsters waited for someone or somethingto remove us from the state of limbo between saving and ruin. Though there was a subtle slide to ruin, no saving or ruining action was ever successful in reversing or accelerating the fate of the world. So I waited, and then you appeared and soon became queen.

“In your infant monsterdom, you had often slumbered in my palace, and I was often warring against other kings on your behalf like a fool. I had not looked as closely as I should have at you nor us. Only when you were queen andmyobsession rose with equal violence did I sit with myself—as I should have done from the start—to inspect our future. I had been so focused on the present, and I had tended to dismiss the future after centuries of seeing how saving and ruining never altered the world. Even then, I nearly missed the truth of us when I inspected the future, but I saw that while I was blind to most futures where you were assumedly queen, there was a slice ofanotherfuture. There was a slice where you were gone, and I could see all again.”

These were words to commit to memory, and yet I could feel The End in me. The obliteration of my heart and hopes and belief in good things. Why did everything he said add up into something sensical? Why was there no foothold of disbelief to cling to?

My voice shook, “What did you see?”

He faced me. “There is much you cannot know on this side of the future. Suffice to say that in that future, you are not queen. There is a king of monsters, and I am he. You are a powerful princess at his side, but a princess only.”

A king.

Aking.

---