Page 16 of Of Skulls Of Shackles

I hummed. “Is that what I am?”

“That is what you have shown.”

“I cannot be certain what my purpose is. Ancients have not revealed so much.”

The princess’s focus drifted out to the garden behind me, and I let mine wander back to my queendom. My sixth was expanding by the dusk. Thatched homes pushed out two blocks in each direction now, and the borders of the five kingdoms that surrounded my queendom were obviously pushed back. I was growing more equal in power to kings by the night.

I said to her, “You feel that which is unnatural and eerie is wrong, I gather.”

“As should we all. Humans know this for a truth. In that, they are wiser than most monsters.”

“Yet even humans crave these, or crave understanding of these things that they feel but cannot explain—in their celebrations and festivals and in their question about The End.” When her expression numbed more than usual, I explained, “The dawn of the new age.”

“That is because beastliness exists in them all. Some tame this beastliness better than others, but it exists in all of them.”

How intriguing. “And in us.”

“In us, too, and in greater and horrendous quantities. We are the painting of what is needed. The ancient-signed signal of wrongness and the need for purge.”

Purge.“A cleaning of the world. Yet your king does not clean. He draws forth beastliness from humans when he could lessen it.”

“When a system no longer works, the system must be broken,” she recited. “Only then can it be rebuilt.”

I agreed with that in a sense. “I had understood that King Change wished to end the world. You say that he wishes to purge it.”

“To eradicate life, yes. To eradicate beastliness. I long for the relief.”

“And of your haunted forest? What would become of that?”

Her lips trembled in somewhat of a smile before she drained the feeling away. “That would remain, and it would not need to be ugly and wrong any longer. Slowly shrubs and vines and canopy would fill the gaps. My trees would fall down in their hundreds of years, and all uniformity would be gone.”

“But the eeriness of emptiness would remain,” I mused.

She blanched, then resumed vacantness. “Emptiness of monsters would never be eerie.”

I knew of an eerie place, a place barren but for a semblance of my queendom and the twelve mothers stitched around it in silent vigil. “Emptiness of monsters is a chilling and trembling fate. Was your king like this in life?”

I made sure to infuse power into my voice. This princess would not give over information easily, but she could not deny me now.

“No,” she blurted, then gasped.Numb again.“He was their general. Their victorious leader. Their moral mentor in human war.”

My,immortality had quite undone kings. “King Change drifted far from himself. From general to ruining adversary. From leader to traitor. From champion of rightness to king of destruction.”

“You seek to understand my king,” she said at last.

“I hold great interest in the why of his ruining urge. I see nothing but magnificence in monsters. How could he see the opposite and so certainly as to be driven to destroy all creatures?”

I had not pushed my power into the question, but she answered anyway, “You forget that his magic is beastly in nature. He feels everyone’s propensity for vice. Like the others, he clung to his human ideals for a time after setting hand to olden rock. My king believed that he had been granted the power to eradicate all the qualities that pushed humans to war and violence and vice.”

“Weariness of failure broke him.”

She scowled. “No such thing. My king is as steadfast as the ages.”

I believed her. “I have observed this unfaltering quality that you speak of. He does not appear to adjust his ideals of ruining based on his desires in any given moment, unlike King Bring.”

The princess blinked a few times. “’Tis not many who can see past the direction of his purpose to remark so. My king is unfaltering indeed.”

In the dealing of hateful acts. Therein lay our difference. That was why I would choose King Bring over King Change any day. “The other princesses have told me you were first to join with a king.”

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