Page 21 of Of Skulls Of Shackles

My mother held up a hellebore. The hellebore glittered like the one she had pushed up from her grave as a message that I was needed here. “Eat this, Daughter.”

I ate it, of course. In my mother I held unshakeable trust.

I ate every last petal.

“You are poisoned,” she stated after. “The jolt of obsession will go better now.”

She gripped my ankle in a hand more bone than flesh, and pulled hard. But I did not land flat on the hard ground.

I sank into hellebores instead, and down, down, down I went in bodyandin mind.

As mother had informed me, I was quite poisoned.

ChapterSix

Champions of her queendom

Wardens of her madness

Istumbled from the grave, clutching my stomach as I staggered over cobblestones. My head felt stagnant, sludgy, much like the shallow water in King Take’s moat.

“My queen,” cried Valetise. “Something ails her.”

My body went rigid as a board. My head snapped up, and my knees hit the cobblestones. I could not have closed my wide eyes if I had exerted all of my considerable ancient power.

The air rippled around me and in my very lungs, then a howl ripped from my lips. My three werebeasts took up the howl without hesitation.

I howled, a servant of madness and poison.

“She is sick,” a princess was saying.

I was not sick. Words ripped from me. “I am obsessed.”

Madwith it. Incoherent with the enticing aroma. I inhaled as the sky thundered and lightning struck Vitale. Thatched homes set alight, and screams rose from my sixth. They were in the way of my obsession, and so their safety did not concern me.

Neither did the safety of the monsters surrounding me, though I knew all of their names.

“Remove yourselves or suffer peril.” My voice was one I had heard before—a menacing and grating voice that whined, high-pitched, as strained metal might.

Three of the monsters surrounding me held spears, and the tallest of them was saying, “She came back through the grave clutching her stomach.”

“Obsession has struck her, Gangrel,” said Princess Bring. “We must let the first wave roll over her, lest she acts upon obsession too soon and too madly.”

And how exactly would they manage that? How laughable.

I bent my knees to jump.

I would attack King Bring first.

“Pawns!” shouted Toil.

A chalky-skinned pawn grabbed my foot as I leaped high. And another one gripped my second foot. I kicked both of the seeing pawns in the face, then landed lightly.

A spear swept my legs out next, but I pushed my power out to flip backwards, then sprung off the wall.

I spun in the air, and a werebeast snapped his jaws at the hem of my dress.

A terrible growl rattled my queendom. They would not prevent my departure, nor my obsession. I saw the way clearly. “Then you have all chosen peril.”

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