Page 18 of Of Skulls Of Shackles

“I will alert all pawns to return,” she quipped. “I expect the haze of protection shall appear, and it would bode better to have all monsters of your queendom trapped within.”

This monster had found a mine in herself untapped. “Such gems and rubies in you. More and more of them. I thank you for your attention to such administrative matters of a queen.”

Silence again.

Yes, I would delight time and again in this monster. “Send word. I travel through the grave very soon.”

ChapterFive

The answer:

If eeriness is haunted emptiness,

Beauty must arise from the haunt.

There was a needle. Thread. Twelve mothers. And a queenly tower that mirrored my queendom in the living world of monsters. But only barrenness was present here. The world held no color, and gray scale spoke of its departure from vitality and from Vitale too. The emptiness extended far beyond the power of my sight into the thick haze, and that fueled my certainty that creatures such as humans and monsters kept emptiness at bay.

Without us… there was this.

Yet there was a warmth in this place that existed just for me. A simple dive through hellebores in Mother’s grave turned me upside down and deposited me in her empty grave. Only a clawing climb was necessary to discover my mother.

She sat beside the first of my fifty ancestral mothers, Cassandra, who was filled with ancient purpose on the edge of death twelve hundred years before.

Beyond Cassandra were ten other Mothers, each sewn together.

They had been drawn, all of them, to my lonely tower through the hazy barrenness beyond. Sometimes, I had arrived to find two or three gathered, and other times, I had waited at Cassandra’s bidding for the arrival of another. Two weeks had seen a total of twelve mothers sewn into eerie vigil around my tower. I assumed that thirty-eight more would eventually come.

“Good evening,” I said to all. “My heart is happy to see you all, and my mind is at peace in your company.”

And so it was, though each Mother did not feel the same in return. My mother was always on my team, and Cassandra was driven in death to this purpose as she had been in life. Others varied, and this had somewhat to do with their temperament and somewhat to do with their order in the chain of fifty.

Adalina, for instance, had been the forty-second mother, only eight before my own mother. While Cassandra had been filled to brimming with ancient purpose, this had dwindled more in each daughter, and Adalina had not possessed any at all. She had believed stoutly in the actions of the women before her, and she had not much liked her life anyway. Adalina possessed a sweetness that had lent itself to the idea of self-sacrifice too.

The choice to wither had not been a difficult one for her.

Others…

Molly had arrived at my tower fifth. Instead of trudging in wearily as others had, she had circled my tower until fainting in a heap on the hazy outskirts. I had carried her here and quickly sewn her into position at Mother’s urging.

Mother had known what I had not—that Molly begrudged her withering most bitterly. She begrudged that ancients had ruled her mind and she could not resist their push. She begrudged that her daughter had shared the same fate. She begrudged that withering had stolen precious decades with her beloved child—and all for the sake of someone else’s child, even though one of her line.

My gaze moved to her daughter beside her.

The arrival of Madison had healed the lurking grudge in Molly. Mother and daughter were reunited, and she had ceased tugging at the stitch that connected her to the twenty-second mother.

“Mothers, are you well?” I asked.

“We are as we are meant to be,” my mother answered, and as always, I wished that she shared the vibrancy of the others. But she had sacrificed journeying in death in her prime to provide for her daughter always.

I nodded. “You called.”

“We called,” chimed twelve mothers.

Their heads tipped back as words were pulled from their throats.

“She that inspires

She they desire

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